What's New in Java EE 6?

Java Platform, Enterprise Edition 6 (Java EE 6) is almost here - slated for release in Q4 2009.

Java EE 6 includes, besides improvements over Java EE 5, the following key themes:

• Profiles (Targetted bundles of technology)
• Pruning (Making some technologies optional (Current list includes: JAX-RPC, EJB 2.x Entity Beans, JAXR, JSR-85)
• Extensibility (Embrace open source libraries & frameworks)
• Ease of development
• EJB Lite
• RESTful Services
• Dependency Injection (at long last?!)
  

And, to summarize the new features, these include:

• EJB 3.1 (JSR 318) [Ease of use, No-interface view, Portable JNDI, Singleton Beans, Timer Service and more]
• JPA 2.0 (JSR 317)
• Servlet 3.0 (JSR 315) [Annotations, Optional web.xml/fragments, better defaults, Asynchronous Processing]
• JSF 2.0 (JSR 314) [AJAX, Simplified component creation]
• JAX-RS 1.1 (JSR 311) [RESTful services]
• Connector Arch 1.6
• Web Beans 1.0 (JSR 299)
• Bean Validation 1.0 (JSR 303)

And, corresponding to the availability of Java EE 6, GlassFish v3 is also coming along by around the same timeframe.

You can get the full details from the following presentation by Sun Microsystems:

Sun Java EE 6 Overview