Jakarta EE, formerly Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) and Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE), is a set of specifications, extending Java SE with specifications for enterprise features such as

distributed computing Distributed computing is a field of computer science that studies distributed systems, defined as computer systems whose inter-communicating components are located on different networked computers. The components of a distributed system commu ...

and

web service A web service (WS) is either: * a service offered by an electronic device to another electronic device, communicating with each other via the Internet, or * a server running on a computer device, listening for requests at a particular port over a n ...

s. Jakarta EE applications are run on reference runtimes, which can be

microservices In software engineering, a microservice architecture is an architectural pattern that organizes an application into a collection of loosely coupled, fine-grained services that communicate through lightweight protocols. This pattern is characterize ...

or application servers, which handle transactions, security, scalability, concurrency and management of the components they are deploying. Jakarta EE is defined by its

specification A specification often refers to a set of documented requirements to be satisfied by a material, design, product, or service. A specification is often a type of technical standard. There are different types of technical or engineering specificati ...

. The specification defines

API An application programming interface (API) is a connection between computers or between computer programs. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that describes how to build ...

s (application programming interface) and their interactions. As with other

Java Community Process The Java Community Process (JCP), established in 1998, is a formal mechanism that enables interested parties to develop standard technical specifications for Java technology. Becoming a member of the JCP requires solid knowledge of the Java program ...

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 E-commerce (electronic commerce) refers to commercial activities including the electronic buying or selling products and services which are conducted on online platforms or over the Internet. E-commerce draws on technologies such as mobile co ...

accounting Accounting, also known as accountancy, is the process of recording and processing information about economic entity, economic entities, such as businesses and corporations. Accounting measures the results of an organization's economic activit ...

banking A bank is a financial institution that accepts Deposit account, deposits from the public and creates a demand deposit while simultaneously making loans. Lending activities can be directly performed by the bank or indirectly through capital m ...

information system An information system (IS) is a formal, sociotechnical, organizational system designed to collect, process, Information Processing and Management, store, and information distribution, distribute information. From a sociotechnical perspective, info ...

History

The platform created by

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc., often known as Sun for short, was an American technology company that existed from 1982 to 2010 which developed and sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services. Sun contributed sig ...

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 An oracle is a person or thing considered to provide insight, wise counsel or prophetic predictions, most notably including precognition of the future, inspired by deities. If done through occultic means, it is a form of divination. Descript ...

under the

. On September 12, 2017,

Oracle Corporation Oracle Corporation is an American Multinational corporation, multinational computer technology company headquartered in Austin, Texas. Co-founded in 1977 in Santa Clara, California, by Larry Ellison, who remains executive chairman, Oracle was ...

announced that it would submit Java EE to the Eclipse Foundation. The Eclipse top-level project has been named Eclipse Enterprise for Java (EE4J). 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 Java is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea (a part of Pacific Ocean) to the north. With a population of 156.9 million people (including Madura) in mid 2024, proje ...

and also the capital of Indonesia,

Jakarta Jakarta (; , Betawi language, Betawi: ''Jakartè''), officially the Special Capital Region of Jakarta (; ''DKI Jakarta'') and formerly known as Batavia, Dutch East Indies, Batavia until 1949, is the capital and largest city of Indonesia and ...

. 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 The Apache Software Foundation ( ; ASF) is an American nonprofit corporation (classified as a 501(c)(3) organization in the United States) to support a number of open-source software projects. The ASF was formed from a group of developers of the ...

Specifications

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

s, such as Jakarta Enterprise Beans, connectors, servlets, Jakarta Server Pages and several

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 (''EL'') 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 (backing) 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 REST (Representational State Transfer) is a software architectural style that was created to describe the design and guide the development of the architecture for the World Wide Web. REST defines a set of constraints for how the architecture of ...

(REST) 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 Jakarta XML Binding (JAXB; formerly Java Architecture for XML Binding) is a software framework that allows Jakarta EE, Java EE developers to map Java class (computer science), classes to XML representations. JAXB provides two main features: the ab ...

allows mapping XML into Java objects; * Jakarta XML Web Services can be used to create SOAP web services.

Enterprise specifications

* Jakarta Activation (''JAF'') specifies an architecture to extend component Beans by providing data typing and bindings of such types. * Jakarta Contexts and Dependency Injection (''CDI'') is a specification to provide a dependency injection container; * Jakarta Enterprise Beans (''EJB'') specification defines a set of lightweight APIs that an object container (the EJB container) will support in order to provide transactions (using JTA),

remote procedure call In distributed computing, a remote procedure call (RPC) is when a computer program causes a procedure (subroutine) to execute in a different address space (commonly on another computer on a shared computer network), which is written as if it were a ...

s (using RMI or RMI-IIOP),

concurrency control In information technology and computer science, especially in the fields of computer programming, operating systems, multiprocessors, and databases, concurrency control ensures that correct results for concurrent operations are generated, whil ...

, dependency injection and

access control In physical security and information security, access control (AC) is the action of deciding whether a subject should be granted or denied access to an object (for example, a place or a resource). The act of ''accessing'' may mean consuming ...

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 (''JPA'') are specifications about object-relational mapping between relation database tables and Java classes. * Jakarta Transactions (''JTA'') 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 (''JMS'') 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 (e.g. Jakarta Persistence model classes) 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 (''EIS'') as part of enterprise application integration (''EAI''). 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:

Certified referencing runtimes

Although by definition all Jakarta EE implementations provide the same base level of technologies (namely, the Jakarta EE spec and the associated APIs), they can differ considerably with respect to extra features (like connectors, clustering,

fault tolerance Fault tolerance is the ability of a system to maintain proper operation despite failures or faults in one or more of its components. This capability is essential for high-availability, mission-critical, or even life-critical systems. Fault t ...

, high availability, security, etc.), installed size,

memory footprint Memory footprint refers to the amount of main memory that a program uses or references while running. The word footprint generally refers to the extent of physical dimensions that an object occupies, giving a sense of its size. In computing, t ...

, startup time, etc.

Jakarta EE

Java EE

Code sample

The code sample shown below demonstrates how various technologies in Java EE 7 are used together to build a web form for editing a user. In Jakarta EE a (web) UI can be built using Jakarta Servlet, Jakarta Server Pages (''JSP''), or Jakarta Faces (''JSF'') with Facelets. The example below uses Faces and Facelets. Not explicitly shown is that the input components use the Jakarta EE Bean Validation API under the covers to validate constraints.

Example Backing Bean class

To assist the view, Jakarta EE uses a concept called a "Backing Bean". The example below use
Contexts and Dependency Injection (CDI)
and Jakarta Enterprise Beans (''EJB''). @Named @ViewScoped public class UserEdit

Example Data Access Object class

To implement business logic, Jakarta Enterprise Beans (''EJB'') is the dedicated technology in Jakarta EE. For the actual persistence,

JDBC Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) is an application programming interface (API) for the Java (programming language), Java programming language which defines how a client may access a database. It is a Java-based data access technology used for Java ...

or Jakarta Persistence (JPA) can be used. The example below uses EJB and JPA. Not explicitly shown is that JTA is used under the covers by EJB to control transactional behavior. @Stateless public class UserDAO

Example Entity class

For defining entity/model classes Jakarta EE provides the Jakarta Persistence (''JPA''), and for expressing constraints on those entities it provides the Bean Validation API. The example below uses both these technologies. @Entity public class User

References

External links

* *
Jakarta EE Compatible Products: Enterprise Java Application and Web Servers
- Eclipse Foundation
The Official Jakarta EE Tutorial

First Cup of Jakarta EE Tutorial
An Introduction to Jakarta EE
Jakarta EE Specification Guide - Jakarta EE Platform

Jakarta EE Official Starter
Generate a Jakarta EE Project

Oracle Technology Network
Jakarta EE official YouTube channel
{{Java (software platform) Articles with example Java code Computing platforms Platform, Enterprise Edition Platform, Enterprise Edition Web frameworks