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The Java Community Process (JCP) gave the Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) 5 specification its complete approval ahead of the JavaOne Conference.

Sun considers the Java EE 5 update the most significant one made to the platform since the debut of J2EE 1.2, way back in December 1999. The JCP's Java EE/SE Executive Committee felt the same way in approving the update.

This should mean attendees of JavaOne will receive the Java EE 5 Software Development Kit (SDK) and Compatibility Test Suite (CTS) during the 2006 JavaOne Conference event, as Sun engineers complete those distributions based on the final Java specification.

"Java EE 5 accelerates and radically simplifies enterprise Java development by removing boilerplate code, relying upon reasonable defaults whenever possible, and providing a broader set of commonly used utility classes," said Bill Shannon, distinguished engineer and JSR 244 Spec Lead, Sun Microsystems.

Michael Cot of the RedMonk analyst firm passed along his insights regarding EE 5 and its impact on Java application development:

The core technologies for delivering Java applications (servlets, transactions, XML, and DB access) have long stabilized, so making Java development as easy as Ruby on Rails, PHP, and other dynamic language development is what I, and many Java developers, are lusting after.

Ideally, in an open source world, I'd like to have seen JEE 5 become more like Spring in the sense that it supported existing APIs and libraries without re-writing them. But, multi-vendor, committee driven standards rarely result in simplicity over completeness, which isn't always a bad thing, just typically an annoying one for the developer who doesn't need the whole enchilada.
Cot suggested another important factor for EE 5, that being industry commentary on the features in the spec. "JBoss's comments and choices were always a reliable gauge of J2EE. For example, they strongly supported Hibernate over entity beans while other vendors seemed to walk the J2EE line," he said.

JBoss, along with IBM, BEA, Oracle, and SAP, numbered among those licensees endorsing the new spec. "JBoss fully supports Java EE 5 because it will provide the most scalable and powerful, yet easy-to-develop platform for enterprise applications," said Sacha Labourey, chief technology officer of JBoss, Inc.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.