Updated March 23, 2023
Introduction to JEE
JEE is a platform that provides API’s (Application Programming Interfaces) for developers and third-party software providers to implement the required functionalities of the interfaces at the server-side. Using these functionalities one can create their own web or enterprise applications as per business needs which are then run on JEE containers such as Tomcat, Jetty or JBoss.
It is an abbreviation of Jakarta Enterprise Edition since early 2018. Before that it was known as Java Enterprise Edition from mid-2006 till early 2017, prior to which it was popularly known as J2EE i.e. Java 2 Platform Enterprise Edition, between late 1999 and mid of 2006. It is one of Java’s many platforms and is built on top of Java SE i.e., Java Standard Edition. Jakarta Enterprise Edition extends Java SE 8 and is compatible with the release thereafter.
Understanding JEE
- As the name suggests it is meant to build large scale applications such as enterprise and web applications. JEE referencing runtimes have found its application across various functional domains, few of which are banking, e-commerce, travel, etc.
- A JEE application typically consists of a client-side and a server-side. The client-side is the one in which an end-user interacts with the application over a browser. It is mainly written in front end technologies.
- HTML and CSS are widely used within a JSP in designing this UI. The server-side code which is written in Java using various technologies such as servlets is meant to handle the end-user requests and also execute back-end database transactions. So what does JEE consist of? What are its core technologies?
JEE Core Technologies
Below are some of the core technologies of JEE:
Web Technologies
- For creating web applications it makes our work easier by providing us with Servlet API’s, JSTL’s i.e. the JSP Standard Tag Library. The Servlet interface further consists of abstract classes such as the HTTPServlet and GenericServlet.
- HTTPServlet consists of methods such as doGet and doPost which take in HttpServlet Request and HttpServlet Response as the parameter that aid in the exchange of data between the client-side code and server-side code.
- The JSP tag Library provides one with pre-defined tags to be used in a JSP making the coding process a lot easier for developers. Other APIs provided by JEE is JSF that is Java Server Faces that aid in user interface construction, EL that is Unified Expression Language for binding JSF components to java beans, etc.
Web Services
- It provides support to two well-known web service styles JAX-WS that is the SOAP web services and JAX-RS, the REST web services (REST – Representational State Transfer). These web services make use of XML and JSON to exchange information among them.
- It provides the Java API for RESTful web services, Java API for JSON processing that decoding and encoding of JSON data, Java API for JSON binding which allows JSON data to be bound to the java classes such that data can be easily converted between these two forms.
- It also provides support for binding XML to Java classes and the Java API for XML web services for creating SOAP service providers and consumers.
Data Access
- It provides the java persistence API and Java transaction API for database related operations. The java persistence API allows the binding of a database table with a java class and the table columns to the java class properties.
- The java transaction API provides interfaces that help carry out operations on the database.
- Hibernate and iBatis are the two most popular implementations of the Java Persistence API.
- Containers: It consists of different containers few among which are the web container and the EJB container. Web containers work as run-time environments for running web applications.
- For example, few widely used implementations are tomcat and jetty. In the case of Spring framework the containers aid in dependency injection and other features provided by spring.
Why should we use it?
Below are a few reasons why we should use JEE.
- It should be used in order to make the development of web applications and enterprise applications faster and easier. One can make use of the number of APIs being offered to be used and customized by writing their own implementations.
- It also helps provide security to your applications by means of APIs such as the Java Security API. It provides features such as authentication, access control, secure end-to-end communication, cryptography, etc. With the help of different APIs and each API covering a certain functionality, may it be data persistence or fetching user inputs or providing security a developers task of developing large-scale applications are simplified?
What else can we do with it?
- It also provides us with various other feature-rich APIs such as JMS- Java Messaging Services, Batch Applications, Validation. The Java Messaging API had been created for the sole purpose of enterprise messaging. It aids a java program in functionalities like sending, receiving and creating messages for an enterprise messaging system.
- A batch application API helps in executing tasks that may need to be run at regular intervals of time. These are generally run in the background. Validations are taken care of by the Bean Validations API. They enforce constraints on Java bean classes, i.e., they pre-determine the kind of values the attributes of these classes can hold. These are very useful when it comes to avoiding SQL injections.
How this technology will help you in career growth?
- With the rapid growth in e-commerce and digitization of the banking industry, the need for developing high quality and secure web applications are on the rise.
- It provides one the opportunity to do so with minimum hassle. Thus learning itcould make a huge impact on landing the dream job or promotion one could be looking for.
Conclusion
In this article, we have briefly seen the various APIs provided by JEE and how they help in developing an enterprise or web application.
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