Novelties of Java EE 7

The Java EE 7 was developed as a Java Specification Request (JSR 342). It has a total of 31 specifications including 4 new specifications, 10 major releases, and 9 MRs (Maintenance Releases). All these specifications are taken into account by the GlassFish Server 4.0 (accessible via the address https://glassfish.java.net/download.html), which is the reference implementation of Java EE 7.

The new specifications introduced in Java EE are as follows:

• Concurrency Utilities for Java EE 1.0 (http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=236), for asynchronous processing and multi-threaded tasks in Java EE application components.

• Batch Applications for the Java Platform 1.0 (http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=352), to perform long-running tasks and bulk operations.

• Java API for JSON Processing 1.0 (http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=353), which provides support for JSON processing. It offers Java EE components the ability to parse, generate, transform, and query JSON format.

• Java API for WebSocket 1.0 (http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=356), to build WebSocket applications.

APIs inherited from the Java EE 6 platform that have undergone major changes are the following:

• Java Platform, Enterprise Edition 7 (Java EE 7) Specification (http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=342), when compared to Java EE 6, further simplifies development, adds support for HTML5, and prepares the platform to migrate to the cloud

• Java Servlet 3.1 Specification (http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=340) introduces some features such as non blocking I/O API and protocol upgrade processing

• Expression Language 3.0 (http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=341) was separated from JSP specification request, and it came with many changes including an API for standalone environments, lambda expressions, and collections objects support

• JavaServer Faces 2.2 (http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=344) integrates the support for the HTML5 standard and brings features such as resource library contracts, Faces Flow, and stateless views

• Java Persistence 2.1 (http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=338) brings us the opportunity to execute Stored Procedures, create named queries at runtime, construct bulk update/delete via the Criteria API, override or change the fetch setting at runtime, and make explicit joins as in SQL

• Enterprise JavaBeans 3.2 (http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=345) introduces the ability to manually disable the passivation of stateful session beans and has also relaxed rules to define the default local or remote business interface

• Java Message Service 2.0 (http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=343) simplifies the API

• JAX-RS 2.0: The Java API for RESTful Web Services (http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=339) simplifies the implementation of RESTful Web Services and introduces new features including Client API, asynchronous processing, filters, and interceptors

• Contexts and Dependency Injection for Java EE 1.1 (http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=346) introduces many changes, some of which are access to the current CDI container, access to the non contexual instances of a bean, and the ability to explicitly destroy bean instances

• Bean Validation 1.1 (http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=349) introduces support for method and constructor validation, group conversion, and message interpolation using expression language

Only the following APIs are affected by maintenance releases:

• Web Services for Java EE 1.4 (http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=109)

• Java Authorization Service Provider Contract for Containers 1.5 (JACC 1.5) (http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=115)

• Java Authentication Service Provider Interface for Containers 1.1 (JASPIC 1.1) (http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=196) standardizes the use of some aspects of the specification

• JavaServer Pages 2.3 (http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=245)

• Common Annotations for the Java Platform 1.2 (http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=250) adds a new annotation for managing priorities

• Interceptors 1.2 (http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=318) adds standard annotation for managing the execution order of interceptors

• Java EE Connector Architecture 1.7 (http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=322) adds two annotations for defining and configuring the resource adapter's resources

• Java Transaction API 1.2 (http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=907) provides the possibility to demarcate transactions declaratively and define beans whose lifecycle is identical to the current transaction

• JavaMail 1.5 (http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=919) slightly simplifies the development of sending an e-mail by adding annotations and methods