Work on the next enterprise edition of Java is proceeding at Oracle, with the company eyeing improvements for cloud computing, REST Web services, and other capabilities, an Oracle representative confirmed on Friday.
Java EE (Java Platform, Enterprise Edition) 7 is due in 2012. Capabilities for deploying cloud computing applications and infrastructures will be key to the upgrade. “[Version 7] will be the basis for how to make Java EE relevant for the cloud,” said Oracle’s Ajay Patel, vice president of product management, in a webcast last week.
The upgrade also will feature significant developments geared to JavaServer Faces, for building server-side user interfaces; the Web tier, Java persistence; and JAX-RS (Java API for RESTful Web Services), according to an Oracle Java team blog post. Java EE builds on Java SE (Java Platform, Standard Edition) and is geared to enterprise-level Java computing. The Glassfish application server has served as a reference implementation of Java EE. Modularity was cited as a goal for Java EE 7 at last fall’s JavaOne conference in San Francisco.
Initial Java Specification Requests pertaining to Java EE 7 were approved by the Java Community Process in January, ncluding JSR 338, for Java Persistence API 2.1, and JSR 339, for JAX-RS 2.0. JPA is designed for use with Java EE and SE and deals with the way relational data is mapped to Java objects and the way the objects are stored in a relational database for access at a later time. Capabilities like multi-tenancy and additional mapping for metadata are being considered for JPA 2.1. JAX-RS provides an API for building Web services using the REST architecture. Key features of the new JSR include a Client API, improved support for URIs, and a Model-View-Controller architecture.
Final release of the two JSRs is planned for 2012. Other JSRs pertaining to Java EE 7 will be submitted soon. Aside from Java EE, version 2.0 of JavaFX, a rich media platform based on Java, is due this summer with such capabilities as a high-performance graphics engine and dynamic language capabilities, Patel said.
