Sun Announces Unanimous Approval for Java EE 5 Specification

May 5, 2006; 01:55 AM

Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW)  announced that the Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) 5 specification ( http://java.sun.com/j2ee/ )has been approved by the Java Community Process (JCP) Java EE/SE Executive Committee in a unanimous vote, bringing virtually unprecedented ease-of-development features and a radically simplified component model to the premier platform for creating and deploying enterprise applications and Web services. Java EE 5 is the most significant update of the programming model to the Enterprise Java development platform since the launch of J2EE 1.2 in December 1999. Java EE 5 continues Sun's decade-long history of innovation in the Java platform for developing portable, robust, scalable, multi-tiered server-side applications.

With more than 30 licensees, Java EE is the premier platform for Java and Web services deployment. Java EE 5, described by JCP Java Specification Request (JSR) 244, includes innovations provided by more than 30 community experts and completed public review in August 2005. In all, 23 individual JSRs focusing on support for the latest web services and service-oriented architecture (SOA) technologies, a major revamp to the programming model, and simplified web application creation make up the Java EE 5 specification. A list of these JSRs can be found at: http://java.sun.com/javaee/5/javatech.html

As a result of the JCP vote, the Java EE 5 Software Development Kit (SDK) and Compatibility Test Suite (CTS) are expected to be made available to developers during the 2006 JavaOne Conference event, as Sun engineers complete those distributions based on the final Java specification.

"Java EE 5 accelerates and radically simplifies enterprise Java development by removing boilerplate code, relying upon reasonable defaults whenever possible, and providing a broader set of commonly used utility classes," said Bill Shannon, distinguished engineer and JSR 244 Spec Lead, Sun Microsystems. "The new ease-of-development features in Java EE 5 are designed to allow developers to get more accomplished in less time and to reduce the complexity of the code they produce."

Key Licensees Announce Early Endorsements

BEA, JBoss, IBM, Oracle, and SAP were among the first licensees to announce endorsements for the new edition of the Java EE platform.

"Java EE has provided BEA with a great platform to deliver the industry's leading application infrastructure for building, blending and deploying service-enabled applications," said Patrick Linskey, EJB technical lead at BEA Systems. "As a long-time contributor to Java EE and an application server category co-inventor, BEA has made significant contributions to this latest release of the specification, Java EE 5, including Web Services Metadata (JSR 181), EJB 3.0 (JSR-220), as well as StaX (JSR 173). BEA is excited about the simplification of the persistence model and will accelerate its adoption by providing OpenJPA, the open source implementation of the Java Persistence API."

"Simplicity is the guiding principle behind the JBoss Enterprise Middleware Suite, and one of the primary reasons JBoss took a leadership position in implementing a preview of the EJB 3.0 specification across several products last year," said Sacha Labourey, chief technology officer of JBoss, Inc. "JBoss fully supports Java EE 5 because it will provide the most scalable and powerful, yet easy-to-develop platform for enterprise applications."

"Open standards like Java EE 5 help Oracle deliver a unique, hot-pluggable architecture that provides customers with the utmost flexibility and choice in designing their infrastructures," said Steven G. Harris, vice president Java Platform Group, Oracle. "Oracle's contribution of TopLink(R) Essentials, the first open source JPA implementation included in the Java EE 5 SDK, not only underscores Oracle's commitment to supporting open standards, but also recognizes the significant advancements in Java development."

"Java is a key platform for SAP, and we are continually looking for new ways to further expand our support of multiple platforms and open standards. We believe that Java EE 5, and Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) 3.0 in particular, represents a tremendous step forward in the Enterprise Java programming model," said Aiaz Kazi, vice president, Solution Marketing of SAP NetWeaver. "SAP is delighted to be showing a preview implementation of EJB 3.0 at the JavaOne 2006 conference and we look forward to supplying our customers with the final version as a key component of SAP NetWeaver."

Specific new features developers will find in Java EE 5 include:

• Enterprise Java Beans (EJB) 3.0 greatly simplifies the programming model by supporting Plain Old Java Objects (POJOs), which can easily be converted to Web Services with Annotations or made persistent using the Java Persistence API.
• The Java Persistence API is a new, high-level persistence interface, jointly developed by Sun and Oracle, which is a much cleaner approach to mapping Java objects to relational databases, and benefits greatly from work done in Hibernate, TopLink, and Java Data Objects (JDO).
• Updated Web Services, including JAX-WS 2.0 and JAXB 2.0, which support the latest W3C and WS-I standards (e.g. SOAP 1.2, WSDL 1.1), protocol and transport independence, and the REST style of web services.
• JavaServer Faces (JSF) 1.2 facilitates building Web 2.0 applications with AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript Technology and XML) and reduces the complexity of constructing user interfaces for Web-based applications by providing pre-packaged components that developers can call on from applications, significantly reducing new code development.
• Extensive support for Annotations which eliminate the need for deployment descriptors in most cases and make it easier to deal with persistence, web services, transactions, security and all the other powerful capabilities of Java EE.

Technical Preview set for May 4, 2006

Jeff Jackson, senior vice president of Java Development and Platform Engineering, Joe Keller, vice president of Marketing for SOA and Integration Platforms and Karen Padir, vice president of Enterprise Java Platform at Sun, will host a 60-minute JavaOne Technical Preview teleconference on May 4, 2006 at 1:00pm PT to discuss details about the Java EE 5 release and take questions from press and analyst communities. Java EE licensees will be on hand to provide their perspectives about different segments of the technology. Media and analysts are invited to participate; for teleconference details, please contact Ashish Patel at (415) 365-0466 or [email protected]

About Sun Microsystems, Inc.

A singular vision -- "The Network Is The Computer" -- guides Sun in the development of technologies that power the world's most important markets. Sun's philosophy of sharing innovation and building communities is at the forefront of the next wave of computing: the Participation Age. Sun can be found in more than 100 countries and on the Web at http://sun.com.