Java EE 5 for Elvis

Traditionally, Enterprise Java (J2EE, now Java EE) has been viewed as a complex, high performance technology. As a result average developers (Elvis) have looked to alternatives like Spring and Hibernate. This has lead to exaggerated reports that Java EE is dead. Java EE 5 will change the game. Difficult boilerplate code is gone, replaced by simple annotations. The best ideas of Hibernate and Spring are part of EE 5. For the first time, large parts of the Java EE technology are accessible to Elvis and Enterprise Java will become a viable option for departmental applications. The focus of this book is the easy part of Java Enterprise Edition (EE) 5, i.e., the part that is accessible to department level corporate developers, i.e., Elvis. The book is intended to help these developers deploy the solution to a business problem in their department. The book will walk them through simple design choices that cover most departmental needs: a web front end, business logic with session beans, persistence with entity beans, transactions, role-based access control, and web services. There will be pointers for further reading, but the emphasis is on pragmatic solutions for the most common problems in applications of moderate size.