From the course: Java EE 8 Essential Training

Java EE 8 platform overview - Java EE Tutorial

From the course: Java EE 8 Essential Training

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Java EE 8 platform overview

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- [Instructor] Let's begin our conversation regarding Java Enterprise Edition. One of the most important concepts to grasp about Java EE is that it is an umbrella specification that contains a group of API specifications for building enterprise systems within Java. Within sub specifications, you will find a variety of development concerns addressed such as web application development, data persistence, building REST APIs, dependency injection and security. The API specifications are governed by the Java Community Process which we'll discuss in a little more detail. The specifications themselves are just documentation that various groups bring to life by coding their implementations. Currently, Java EE is at version eight and the project has been handed off by Oracle to the Eclipse Foundation. Java EE API specifications are created through the Java Community Process which basically consists of an approval process for Java specification requests and their development and release. Industry experts, Java user groups and individual contributors participate in the process of developing an API specification. Once a specification is released, various groups in the Java community build implementations of the API writing the actual source code behind the API. These implementations are typically made available by vendors in their application servers which can be certified as Java EE compliant. Currently, there are 20 Java EE 8 compliant implementations. The JSP establishes the direction of Java EE through the JSRs they approve. This helps move the technology forward in alignment with its goals. The overarching goal of Java EE is to help developers quickly build enterprise systems, providing higher level abstractions for handling common system concerns. So imagine if you needed messaging within a system you are developing. You could code all of the network connectivity for the messaging system, however, with Java EE, there's an API for that. Over the past few versions, Java EE has embraced several high-level goals that transition the technologies towards support of modern development techniques such as suitability for cloud environments and microservice architectures. Additionally, Java EE has incorporated support from developments outside of Java such as HTML5, and HTTP/2. Another key theme is simplifying the platform which has been achieved using annotations, and dependency injection, eliminating the need for massive amounts of XML configuration. There are roughly 35 APIs included in Java Enterprise Edition most of which are depicted here. For the best use of your time, we'll be covering 15 of the most relevant and useful APIs found within Java EE. Many of the APIs covered in the course help developers create web applications such as the servlets, JSP, JSF, JAX-RS, and web sockets APIs. Another subset of the APIs we'll cover addresses cross-cutting concerns used throughout Java EE technologies such as CDI, expression language and bean validation. CDI is a great example here. It's the dependency injection technology at the foundation of Java EE. Two of the APIs you'll learn, JSONP and the new JSONB API, provide tolls for working with JSON in Java. We'll also explore JPA which is used for persisting information to relational databases and JMS which provides support for messaging in Java. You will also get an overview of enterprise Java beans for building services and the new security API that standardizes security across Java EE applications. So that was just a glimpse of the APIs we'll cover in the course. We'll dive in deeper with hands-on lessons for each API that teach you to create better enterprise applications in Java.

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