Jakarta EE


Jakarta EE, formerly Java Platform, Enterprise Edition and Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition, is a set of specifications, extending Java SE with specifications for enterprise features such as distributed computing and web services. Jakarta EE applications are run on reference runtimes, which can be microservices or application servers, which handle transactions, security, scalability, concurrency and management of the components they are deploying.
Jakarta EE is defined by its specification. The specification defines APIs and their interactions. As with other Java Community Process specifications, providers must meet certain conformance requirements in order to declare their products as Jakarta EE compliant.
Examples of contexts in which Jakarta EE referencing runtimes are used are: e-commerce, accounting, banking information systems.

History

The platform created by Sun Microsystems was known as Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition or J2EE from version 1.2, until the name was changed to Java Platform, Enterprise Edition or Java EE in version 1.5.
After Sun was acquired in 2009, Java EE was maintained by Oracle under the Java Community Process. On September 12, 2017, Oracle Corporation announced that it would submit Java EE to the Eclipse Foundation. The Eclipse top-level project has been named Eclipse Enterprise for Java. The Eclipse Foundation could not agree with Oracle over the use of and Java trademarks. Oracle owns the trademark for the name "Java" and the platform was renamed from Java EE to Jakarta EE. The name refers to the largest city on the island of Java and also the capital of Indonesia, Jakarta. The name should not be confused with the former Jakarta Project which fostered a number of current and former Java projects at the Apache Software Foundation.
Platform versionReleaseSpecification SupportImportant Changes
Jakarta EE 11Data
Jakarta EE 10Removal of deprecated items in Servlet, Faces, CDI and EJB. CDI-Build Time.
JDK 11 support
Jakarta EE 9Java SE 8API namespace move from to
Jakarta EE 8Java SE 8Full compatibility with Java EE 8
Java EE 82017-08-31Java SE 8HTTP/2 and CDI based Security
Java EE 72013-05-28Java SE 7WebSocket, JSON and HTML5 support
Java EE 62009-12-10Java SE 6CDI managed Beans and REST
Java EE 52006-05-11Java SE 5Java annotations and Generics in Java
J2EE 1.42003-11-11J2SE 1.4WS-I interoperable web services
J2EE 1.32001-09-24J2SE 1.3Java connector architecture
J2EE 1.21999-12-17J2SE 1.2Initial specification release

Specifications

Jakarta EE includes several specifications that serve different purposes, like generating web pages, reading and writing from a database in a transactional way, and managing distributed queues.
The Jakarta EE APIs include several technologies that extend the functionality of the base Java SE APIs, such as Jakarta Enterprise Beans, connectors, servlets, Jakarta Server Pages and several web service technologies.

Web specifications

  • Jakarta Servlet: defines how to manage HTTP requests, in a synchronous or asynchronous way. It is low level and other Jakarta EE specifications rely on it;
  • Jakarta WebSocket: API specification that defines a set of APIs to service WebSocket connections;
  • Jakarta Faces: a technology for constructing user interfaces out of components;
  • Jakarta Expression Language is a simple language originally designed to satisfy the specific needs of web application developers. It is used specifically in Jakarta Faces to bind components to beans and in Contexts and Dependency Injection to named beans, but can be used throughout the entire platform.

    Web service specifications

  • Jakarta RESTful Web Services provides support in creating web services according to the Representational State Transfer architectural pattern;
  • Jakarta JSON Processing is a set of specifications to manage information encoded in JSON format;
  • Jakarta JSON Binding provides specifications to convert JSON information into or from Java classes;
  • Jakarta XML Binding allows mapping XML into Java objects;
  • Jakarta XML Web Services can be used to create SOAP web services.

    Enterprise specifications

  • Jakarta Activation specifies an architecture to extend component Beans by providing data typing and bindings of such types.
  • Jakarta Contexts and Dependency Injection is a specification to provide a dependency injection container;
  • Jakarta Enterprise Beans specification defines a set of lightweight APIs that an object container will support in order to provide transactions, remote procedure calls, concurrency control, dependency injection and access control for business objects. This package contains the Jakarta Enterprise Beans classes and interfaces that define the contracts between the enterprise bean and its clients and between the enterprise bean and the ejb container.
  • Jakarta Persistence are specifications about object-relational mapping between relation database tables and Java classes.
  • Jakarta Transactions contains the interfaces and annotations to interact with the transaction support offered by Jakarta EE. Even though this API abstracts from the really low-level details, the interfaces are also considered somewhat low-level and the average application developer in Jakarta EE is either assumed to be relying on transparent handling of transactions by the higher level EJB abstractions, or using the annotations provided by this API in combination with CDI managed beans.
  • Jakarta Messaging provides a common way for Java programs to create, send, receive and read an enterprise messaging system's messages.

    Other specifications

  • Jakarta Validation: This package contains the annotations and interfaces for the declarative validation support offered by the Jakarta Validation API. Jakarta Validation provides a unified way to provide constraints on beans that can be enforced cross-layer. In Jakarta EE, Jakarta Persistence honors bean validation constraints in the persistence layer, while JSF does so in the view layer.
  • Jakarta Batch provides the means for batch processing in applications to run long running background tasks that possibly involve a large volume of data and which may need to be periodically executed.
  • Jakarta Connectors is a Java-based tool for connecting application servers and enterprise information systems as part of enterprise application integration. This is a low-level API aimed at vendors that the average application developer typically does not come in contact with.

    Web profile

In an attempt to limit the footprint of web containers, both in physical and in conceptual terms, the web profile was created, a subset of the Jakarta EE specifications. The Jakarta EE web profile comprises the following:
SpecificationJava EE 6Java EE 7Java EE 8
Jakarta EE 8
Jakarta EE 9
Jakarta EE 9.1
Jakarta EE 10Jakarta EE 11
Jakarta Servlet3.03.14.05.06.06.1
Jakarta Server Pages 2.22.32.33.03.14.0
Jakarta Expression Language 2.23.03.04.05.06.0
Jakarta Debugging Support for Other Languages 1.01.01.02.02.02.0
Jakarta Standard Tag Library 1.21.21.22.03.03.0
Jakarta Faces2.02.22.33.04.04.1
Jakarta RESTful Web Services 1.12.02.13.03.14.0
Jakarta WebSocket 1.01.12.02.12.2
Jakarta JSON Processing 1.01.12.02.12.1
Jakarta JSON Binding 1.12.03.03.0
Jakarta Annotations 1.11.21.32.02.13.0
Jakarta Enterprise Beans 3.1 Lite3.2 Lite3.2 Lite4.0 Lite4.0 Lite4.0 Lite
Jakarta Transactions 1.11.21.22.02.02.0
Jakarta Persistence 2.02.12.23.03.13.2
Jakarta Bean Validation1.01.12.03.03.03.1
Jakarta Managed Beans1.01.01.02.0N/a
Jakarta Interceptors1.11.21.22.02.12.2
Jakarta Contexts and Dependency Injection 1.01.12.03.04.04.1
Jakarta Dependency Injection1.01.01.02.02.02.0
Jakarta Security1.02.03.04.0
Jakarta Authentication1.01.12.03.03.1
Jakarta Concurrency3.03.1