Oracle is officially launching Java EE 7 with a live webcast today at 9 am PT / 12 pm ET / 5 pm London, and a repeat performance at 9 pm PT / 12 am ET (Thursday) / 2 pm Sydney (Thursday). Along with the release Oracle has put out added a reference implementation for the specification in the form of GlassFish 4.0, and Netbeans 7.3.1 providing an EE 7 compatible IDE.
Originally planned to be released by the end of last year, EE 7 has suffered delays and seen both headline cloud features and a long overdue caching API delayed to a future EE version. However the release - the first under Oracle's stewardship - is still substantial, comprising 14 JSRs and 9 Maintenance Releases (MRs).
Along with Oracle, vendors leading JSRs included Red Hat (CDI and Bean Validation) and IBM (Batch). New capabilities added to the platform include the WebSocket, JSON, Concurrency, and aforementioned Batch JSRs, whilst JAX-RS, JMS, and Expression Language have received major updates.
Writing on her blog, EE 7 spec lead Linda DeMichiel provides a complete list of changes, as follows:
JSRs:
- Java Platform, Enterprise Edition 7 (JSR 342)
- Concurrency Utilities for Java EE 1.0 (JSR 236)
- Java Persistence 2.1 (JSR 338)
- JAX-RS: The Java API for RESTful Web Services 2.0 (JSR 339)
- Java Servlet 3.1 (JSR 340)
- Expression Language 3.0 (JSR 341)
- Java Message Service 2.0 (JSR 343)
- JavaServer Faces 2.2 (JSR 344)
- Enterprise JavaBeans 3.2 (JSR 345)
- Contexts and Dependency Injection for Java EE 1.1 (JSR 346)
- Bean Validation 1.1 (JSR 349)
- Batch Applications for the Java Platform 1.0 (JSR 352)
- Java API for JSON Processing 1.0 (JSR 353)
- Java API for WebSocket 1.0 (JSR 356)
MRs:
- Web Services for Java EE 1.4 (JSR 109)
- Java Authorization Service Provider Contract for Containers 1.5 (JACC 1.5) (JSR 115)
- Java Authentication Service Provider Interface for Containers 1.1 (JASPIC 1.1) (JSR 196)
- JavaServer Pages 2.3 (JSR 245)
- Common Annotations for the Java Platform 1.2 (JSR 250)
- Interceptors 1.2 (JSR 318)
- Java EE Connector Architecture 1.7 (JSR 322)
- Java Transaction API 1.2 (JSR 907)
- JavaMail 1.5 (JSR 919)
The webcast will include a Business Keynote from Hasan Rizvi and Cameron Purdy, a Technical Keynote from Java EE 7 spec lead Linda DeMichiel, and 15 short technical sessions in 3 tracks organised around the main themes of the EE 7 release (scalable, dynamic HTML5; increasing developer productivity; and meeting enterprise demands).
Oracle has also started publishing a number of technical articles around the main features of EE 6 including Web Socket and JAX-RS 2.