Java EE Tutorial: All You Need To Know About Java EE

The Java EE stands as an abbreviation for Java Enterprise Edition. The Java EE comes with some advanced Java specifications in collaboration with the Java Standard Edition(SE). This article is dedicated to helping you have a detailed understanding of the Java EE(Enterprise edition) through the following docket below.

• What is Java EE?
• Why we need Java EE?
• Java EE Specification
• System Requirements
• How to set up the Java EE Environment?
• Java SE v/s Java EE

What is Java EE?

Java EE is an abbreviation for Java Enterprise Edition. We can consider the Java Enterprise Edition as an upgraded version of Java SE (Standard Edition). It adds these upgrades for supporting enterprise-level developer requirements.

Following the brief introduction to Java EE, we shall now move ahead and learn why we exactly need Java EE, in the next segment.

Why We Need Java EE? 

The advanced Java specifications in Java EE are incorporated to make a few requirements meet. The following are the few significant reasons for which we need Java EE in real-time.

Powerful API Support

The Java EE since the version is consistently upgrading and finding ways to improve API and programming models for the latest applications and incorporate the features requested by the worldwide developers' community.

Reduce Development Time

The primary motto of introducing the Java EE was to reduce the complexities associated with the application development time. Since the Java EE version 5, the XML Deployment descriptors have gone optional. Instead, developers enter the information in the form of an annotation directly into a Java source file. The Java EE server will assist the developer in configuring the component at deployment and runtime automatically.

Reduce Application Complexity

These days, the developers instantly identify the necessity for distributed, transactional, and portable applications that increase server-side technology's agility, safety, and reliability. The Java EE focuses on helping enterprise applications in being designed, built, and produced with less complexity, more incredible speed, and limited cost-effectiveness resources.

System Application Performance

Java EE has made Java enterprise application development easier or faster. The Java EE platform's motto takes pride in providing developers with a robust set of APIs. This is done while reducing development time, reducing application complexity, and improving the performance of the application.

Now that we understand precisely why we needed Java EE, let us continue and learn the various specification in which we find the implementations of Java EE in real-time.

Java EE Specification

Java EE has various specifications for different purposes. They can perform reading, writing database management, transaction processing, and web page designing. 

The Java EE has four different specifications, as shown below.

We will learn about all the specifications in a more detailed way moving on.

Enterprise Specification

Context and Dependency Injection

The Java Enterprise Edition provides the software container developed to enable the injection of dependencies in Swing.

Java Enterprise Java Bean

These are APIs that an object container executes to provide transactions, remote procedure calls, and concurrency control.

Java Persistence API

Persistence APIs are the specifications of object-relational mapping between relational database tables and Java classes.

Java Transaction API

Transaction API includes the interfaces and annotations to establish interaction between transaction support offered by Java EE.

Web Specification

Java Servlet

Java Servlet specification defines how you can manage HTTP requests, either synchronously or asynchronously.

Web Socket

Java WebSocket is a communication protocol. Web socket API provides a set of APIs to facilitate WebSocket connections.

Java Server Faces

Java Server Faces are the services that help in the building of GUI out of Server components.

Unified Expression Language

Unified Expression Language is a simple language that was specifically designed to facilitate web application developers.

Web Service Specifications

RESTful Web Services

RESTful API Web Service helps in providing services having Representational State Transfer schema.

JSON Processing 

JSON Processing is a combination of specifications to manage the information provided in JSON format.

JSON Binding

JSON Binding is a set of specifications used for binding or parsing a JSON file into Java classes.

XML Binding

JSON Binding allows binding of XML into Java objects.

Other Specifications

Validation

The Validation package contains various interfaces and annotations for declarative validation support offered by Bean Validation API.

Batch Applications

The Validation package contains various interfaces and annotations for declarative validation support offered by Bean Validation API.

Java EE Connectors

Java EE Connector is a Java-based technological solution for connecting Java servers to Enterprise Information System.

The Java EE specifications will now understand the minimum hardware requirements to install Java EE into our local system.

System Requirements

The following are hardware requirements you need to have in your local system to install Java EE.

1. JVM Standard Edition 6
2. Windows / Linux Operating System
3. 1 GB RAM
4. 250 GB ROM Space
5. Java Development Kit

Followed by the Hardware Specification, we will now learn how to install and configure Java EE into our local environment.

How to Set Up the Java EE Environment?

To install and set up the Java EE environment in our local Windows Operating system, we need to follow the steps below.

1. Browse to Oracle official Java site
2. Go to Java SE Development Kit 
3. Accept the license terms
4. Download the JDK file
5. Run JDK as Administrator
6. Setup Java Environment

For a detailed and elaborate explanation of installing Java into your local windows operating system, please refer to the following article.

One-Stop Solution for Java Installation in Windows

Next, we will understand the critical differences between the Standard Edition and the Enterprise Edition of Java.

Java SE v/s Java EE

Next, we will understand the critical differences between the Standard Edition and the Enterprise Edition of Java.

Java SE	Java EE
Java SE Provides basic functionalities like defining Classes and Objects.	Java EE mainly focuses on the high-end and corporate type of Java Applications.
Java SE is Standard Specification.	Java EE is an advanced specification to support Web Applications and Servlets.
Java SE has features like class libraries and deployment environments.	Java EE has a structured application with clients, business, and enterprise layers.
We use Java SE for desktop and mobile application development.	We use mainly Java EE for web development.
Beginners mostly use Java SE.	Experts mostly use Java EE.
Java SE does not have authentication.	Java EE has authentication.

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Next Steps

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The link to your next step is here. What is Exception Handling in Java?

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