News

Oracle and Sun Team Up on EJB 3.0

• By John K. Waters
• July 5, 2005

Oracle Corporation and Sun Microsystems will serve as co-specification leads for the Enterprise JavaBeans 3.0 spec, the two companies announced last week (6/29).

EJB 3.0, which is being advanced through the Java Community Process as JSR 220, is considered the cornerstone of the upcoming Java Platform Enterprise Edition 5. The new spec overhauls the Enterprise JavaBean architecture that drives business logic and persistence for Java EE applications, simplifying the programming model to significantly improve developer productivity.

The role of the spec lead in the JCP is to drive a proposed specification through the process.

In a related announcement, Oracle disclosed it will also provide the reference implementation for EJB 3.0's new Java Persistence Application Programming Interface with its TopLink Java object-to-relational tool and deployment platform.

EJB 3.0 has two primary components, explains David Bryant, senior director of marketing in Sun's application platform products group. First is the new interface, which is much improved over EJB 2.1, and underscores the overall theme of Java EE 5: ease of development. And there's the abstract persistence API, which is where TopLink comes in. The new persistence API is designed to be generic—in other words, to be usable outside EJB 3.0, and even Java EE 5.

"There’s a lot of focus across the platform on making Java EE 5 much more approachable for mainstream developers," Bryant tells ProgrammingTrends. “When we say ease of development, we mean through the whole lifecycle, not just in the crafting of code.”

The new spec is also intended to make Java EE, which has a reputation for being highly complex, more approachable, Bryant says.

“This is the tension you see in the Java developer community,” Bryant says. “You’ve got the developers who love Java, who know how to use it, and become experts at it. These developers just want more of that power-tool capability. Yet, there is a large and growing number of people who don't have that level of skills who are interested in Java. And they want life to be simpler.”

Oracle is donating the TopLink technology under Sun's CDDL license as part of Project GlassFish, the open-source implementation of the Sun Java System Application Server Platform Edition 9.0 software.

Oracle is contributing the software as part of its overall mission to stake out a leadership position in SOA application development, says Rick Schultz, VP of Oracle Fusion Middleware. "EJB 3.0 is another technology that we’re betting on," Schultz says. "We believe that simplifying enterprise Java development is an important part of simplifying the development of SOA apps."

Oracle is giving developers an advanced look at EJB 3.0 with the release in March Oracle Application Server EJB 3.0 Preview. That preview is available for free download at: http://www.oracle.com/technology/tech/java/ejb30.html.

Project GlassFish is available online at http://GlassFish.dev.java.net.