Public review begins for Java EE 7

The public review of the Java Enterprise Edition 7 specification has begun and developers and others interested in the composition of the next generation of enterprise Java have until 11 February 2013 to examine the documents and make their views known. There is also a preview version of the Java EE 7 Web Profile available for download, which includes the custom Web development subset of Java EE 7.

The final version of Java EE 7, also known as Java Specification Request (JSR) 342, is scheduled to be released in Spring 2013. It sets out, as an objective, to respond to the various trends that have emerged since the release of Java EE 6. As well as incorporating support for the latest web standards including HTML5, Web Sockets, JSON and a modern HTTP client API, it sets out to ease development and provide an infrastructure for cloud support. Among the new APIs being included are the Java API for JSON Processing (JSR 353 in public review), Java API for WebSocket (JSR 356 in public review), Batch Applications for the Java Platform (JSR 352 passed public review in December 2012), Concurrency Utilities for Java EE (JSR 236 in public review), and JCache (JSR 107 still in early draft status).

Another important element of Java EE 7 is the refreshing of the Java Message Service (JMS, JSR 343 also in public review) which was last updated in 2002; the revised JMS 2.0 should be easier to use and require significantly less boilerplate code. Java EE 7 also supports annotations and Context and Dependency Injection (CDI, JSR 346 passed public review in December 2012). It also includes version 3.0 of Expression Language (JSR 341, passed public review July 2012), JAX-RX 2.0 (JSR 229, passed public review November 2012) and numerous minor revisions to JPA, EJB, JSF and other APIs.

(djwm)