Sun Microsystems is coming out with the next edition of the Java 2 Enterprise Edition. I read a lengthy article about the new features in this framework. Here are some of the goodies that Sun says is in J2EE 6.There are profiles which support a subset of the J2EE standard, allowing for lean deployments. Next is the idea of extensibility. Basically they are providing a way to include plugins into the system.
There is a JAX-RS API which helps you develop RESTful web services. There is also bean validation. This is a standard mechanism to perform data validation before saving to a database.
Asynchronous processing of beans is built in now. J2EE will also now support AJAX. There is a scaled down Enterprise Java Beans release called EJB lite.
Another technology is JPA, which stands for Java Persistence API. Finally there is a Criteria API which is a way to query objects. I myself do not have any experience with J2EE. However the Java dudes consider it essential. So you know I will be learning the basics soon.
