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 and web services. Jakarta EE applications are run on reference runtimes, which can be microservices or application servers, which handle transactions, security, scalability, concurrency and management of the components they are deploying.
Jakarta EE is defined by its specification. The specification defines APIs (application programming interface) and their interactions. As with other Java Community Process 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, accounting, banking information systems.
History The platform created by Sun Microsystems 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 under the Java Community Process. On September 12, 2017, Oracle Corporation 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 and also the capital of Indonesia, Jakarta. 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.
+ Java enterprise platform history Platform version Release Specification Support Important Changes Jakarta EE 11 11 Data Jakarta EE 10 10 Removal of deprecated items in Servlet, Faces, CDI and EJB (Entity Beans and Embeddable Container). CDI-Build Time. 9.1 JDK 11 support Jakarta EE 9 9 Java SE 8 API namespace move from to Jakarta EE 8 8 Java SE 8 Full compatibility with Java EE 8 Java EE 8 2017-08-31 JSR 366 Java SE 8 HTTP/2 and CDI based Security Java EE 7 2013-05-28 JSR 342 Java SE 7 WebSocket, JSON and HTML5 support Java EE 6 2009-12-10 JSR 316 Java SE 6 CDI managed Beans and REST Java EE 5 2006-05-11 JSR 244 Java SE 5 Java annotations and Generics in Java J2EE 1.4 2003-11-11 JSR 151 J2SE 1.4 WS-I interoperable web services J2EE 1.3 2001-09-24 JSR 58 J2SE 1.3 Java connector architecture J2EE 1.2 1999-12-17 1.2 J2SE 1.2 Initial specification release
Specifications Jakarta EE includes several specifications that serve different purposes, like generating web pages, reading and writing from a database in a transactional way, and managing distributed queues.
The Jakarta EE APIs include several technologies that extend the functionality of the base Java SE APIs, such as Jakarta Enterprise Beans, connectors, servlets, Jakarta Server Pages and several web service 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) 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 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 calls (using RMI or RMI-IIOP), concurrency control, dependency injection and access control 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 in implementing the X/Open XA standard, 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: Specification Java EE 6 Java EE 7 Java EE 8Jakarta EE 8Jakarta EE 9Jakarta EE 9.1Jakarta EE 10Jakarta EE 11 Jakarta Servlet 3.0 3.1 4.05.06.06.1 Jakarta Server Pages (JSP) 2.2 2.3 2.33.03.14.0 Jakarta Expression Language (EL) 2.2 3.0 3.04.05.06.0 Jakarta Debugging Support for Other Languages (JSR-45) 1.0 1.0 1.02.02.02.0 Jakarta Standard Tag Library (JSTL) 1.2 1.2 1.22.03.03.0 Jakarta Faces 2.0 2.2 2.33.04.04.1 Jakarta RESTful Web Services (JAX-RS) 1.1 2.0 2.13.03.14.0 Jakarta WebSocket (WebSocket) 1.0 1.12.02.12.2 Jakarta JSON Processing (JSON-P) 1.0 1.12.02.12.1 Jakarta JSON Binding (JSON-B) 1.12.03.03.0 Jakarta Annotations (CA) 1.1 1.2 1.32.02.13.0 Jakarta Enterprise Beans (EJB) 3.1 Lite 3.2 Lite 3.2 Lite4.0 Lite4.0 Lite4.0 Lite Jakarta Transactions (JTA) 1.1 1.2 1.22.02.02.0 Jakarta Persistence (JPA) 2.0 2.1 2.23.03.13.2 Jakarta Bean Validation 1.0 1.1 2.03.03.03.1 Jakarta Managed Beans 1.0 1.0 1.02.0N/a Jakarta Interceptors 1.1 1.2 1.22.02.12.2 Jakarta Contexts and Dependency Injection (CDI) 1.0 1.1 2.03.04.04.1 Jakarta Dependency Injection 1.0 1.0 1.02.02.02.0 Jakarta Security 1.02.03.04.0 Jakarta Authentication 1.0 1.12.03.03.1 Jakarta Concurrency 3.03.1
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, high availability, security, etc.), installed size, memory footprint, startup time, etc.
Jakarta EE
Referencing runtimeDeveloperJakarta EE 10 PlatformJakarta EE 9/9.1 Platform Compatible ProductsJakarta EE 9/9.1 Web Profile Compatible ProductsJakarta EE 8 Platform Compatible ProductsJakarta EE 8 Web Profile Compatible ProductsLicensing GlassFish Eclipse 7.0.0 6.0.0/ 6.1.0 6.0.0/ 6.1.0 5.1.0 5.1.0 Open Liberty IBM 22.0.0.13-beta, 23.0.0.3 21.0.0.12 21.0.0.12 19.0.0.6, 20.0.0.3 19.0.0.6, 20.0.0.3 WebSphere Liberty IBM 23.0.0.3 21.0.0.12 21.0.0.12 20.0.0.3 20.0.0.3 WildFly Red Hat 27.0.0.Alpha5 23.0.1-Preview/25.0.0-Preview 23.0.1-Preview/25.0.0-Preview 18.0.0 18.0.0 JBoss EAP Red Hat 8.0.0 7.3.0 7.3.0 TomEE Apache 10.x 9.x 9.x 8.x 8.x Payara Server Payara Services Limited 6.2022.1 Alpha 4 6.2021.1 Alpha 1 5.22.0, 5.23.0 5.23.0 Thunisoft Application Server Beijing Thunisoft Information Technology 3.0 2.8 JEUS TmaxSoft 8.5 InforSuite Application Server Shandong Cvicse Middleware 11 10 WebOTX NEC 12 11
Java EE
Referencing runtimeDeveloperJava EE 8 certified – FullJava EE 8 certified – WebJava EE 7 certified – FullJava EE 7 certified – WebJava EE 6 certified – Full Official Oracle page for Java EE Compatibility.Java EE 6 certified – WebJava EE 5 certifiedJ2EE 1.4 certifiedLicensing GlassFish server Open Source Edition Oracle v5.0 v5.0 v4.x v4.x v3.x and upward v3.x Web Profile v2.1.x Oracle GlassFish Server Oracle v3 based on the open source GlassFish application server Sun Java System Application Server v9.0 Sun Java System Application Server v8.2 Oracle WebLogic Server Oracle 14.1.1 12.2.1 v12c v10.3.5.0 v9 WildFly Red Hat v14.x v14.x v8.1 v8.0.0.Final v7.1 v6.0 and v7.0 v5.1 v4.x JBoss Enterprise Application Platform Red Hat v7.2 v7.0 v7.0 v6.0 v5 IBM WebSphere Application Server IBM v9.x v9.x v8 v7 IBM WebSphere Application Server Liberty IBM v18.0.0.2 v18.0.0.2 v8.5.5.6 v8.5.5.6 v8.5.5 Open LibertyIBM v18.0.0.2 v18.0.0.2 IBM WebSphere Application Server Community EditionIBM v3.0 v2.1 Apache GeronimoApache v3.0-beta-1 v2.0 v1.0 JEUS TmaxSoft v8 v7 v6 v5 Cosminexus Application Server Hitachi v10.0 v9 Fujitsu Interstage Application Server Fujitsu v12.0 v1 Azure/v10.1 WebOTXNEC BES Application ServerBaolande v9.5 Apache TomEE Apache 7 (Java EE 7 like, but not certified) Resin Server Caucho v4.0 Siwpas OW2 v6.0 JOnAS OW2 v5.3 rc1 SAP NetWeaver SAP v2.x Oracle Containers for Java EE Oracle Oracle iPlanet Web Server Oracle Sun Java System Web Server Oracle Application Server 10g Oracle Pramati ServerPramati Technologies v5.0 Trifork T4 Trifork Sybase Enterprise Application ServerSybase
Jakarta Mail Jakarta Mail (formerly JavaMail) is a Jakarta EE API used to send and receive email via SMTP, POP3 and IMAP. Jakarta Mail is built into the Jakarta EE platform, but also provides an optional package for use in Java SE.
The current version is 2.1.3, released on February 29, 2024. Another open source Jakarta Mail implementation exists (GNU JavaMail), which -while supporting only the obsolete JavaMail 1.3 specification- provides the only free NNTP backend, which makes it possible to use this technology to read and send news group articles.
As of 2019, the software is known as Jakarta Mail, and is part of the Jakarta EE brand (formerly known as Java EE). The reference implementation is part of the Eclipse Angus project.