Because of their use, distributed applications require some non functional services such as remote access, security, transaction management, concurrency, and robustness, among others. Unless you have APIs that offer these types of services, you need to implement them all from scratch and therefore, increase the number of bugs, reduce software quality, and increase production costs and time. The Java EE platform was set up to save the developer from these concerns. It is made up of a set of APIs that facilitate the development and deployment of distributed, robust, scalable, and interoperable applications.

Since its first release in 1999, the Java EE platform has evolved over time by offering a newer, richer, and simpler version than the previous one. In order for you to have an overview of the improvements in Java EE 7, this chapter addresses the following topics: