If Java 2 Enterprise Edition 1.4 was about bringing Web services into the enterprise Java fold, then J2EE 1.5 is all about ease of development in the enterprise Java space. In a session at the Serverside Java Symposium here, Bill Shannon, a distinguished engineer at Sun Microsystems Inc., and Graham Hamilton, a vice president and fellow in the Java platform team at Sun, discussed the specifics of the next version of the J2EE platform and the ease-of-use features in the current version of the Java 2 Standard Edition (J2SE) platform—J2SE 1.5, also known by the code name "Tiger"—upon which J2EE 1.5 is based.
Giving one of the first public early peeks at the forthcoming specification, Shannon said the major theme of J2EE 1.5 is "ease of development. We"re still in early planning, but it"s all about attracting more developers to it." Sun, along with BEA Systems Inc., IBM and others, has been focusing on creating tools to address the complexity in building enterprise-class Java applications. However, the Java platform team at Sun is going further to include ease-of-development support in J2EE.