Exploring the latest Java EE6

BANGALORE, INDIA: Post lunch, the audience at Spark IT 2010 here sat to explore what is new in Java EE6, with Dr.B V Kumar, director, Technology, Congnizant Technology Solutions leading the session.

“There have been major changes in incorporating a series of applications. Building applications should be with ease of development and quick with respect to timeline. Extensibility and ease of development are the new developments that are featured in the latest Java EE6. The new features also include enhanced support for SOA and introduction of profiles and pruning,” Kumar said.

“Enterprise edition has become huge and therefore facing the problem of stacking up. So one should come up with a platform where I should be able to develop applications quickly,” he added.

Profiles focus on specific class of applications and reduce the overhead of Enterprise Edition platform. It tries to identify and create a profile that includes minimum set of mandatory components. Latest version in Java EE6 defines current profile as web profile.

Elaborating on pruning, he said that it helped in optionalising old technologies.

“The existing Java EE is carrying many pre-historic creatures such as Entity Beans, deployment descriptor etc. Today we can mark these old technologies for pruning. Pruning does not mean to throw it (old technologies) out but to make options that enables my platform simpler, thinner, and to be in good shape,” he added.

The other new technologies in Java EE6 include Servlet 3.0, bean validation, JAX WS 2.2, JAX B 2.2 etc. Some of them were also part of Java EE5 but there are differences in the technology added in the new platform, according to Kumar.