Developers today increasingly recognize the need for distributed, transactional,

and portable
applications that leverage the speed, security, and reliability of server-side t
echnology. In the
world of information technology, enterprise applicationsmust be designed, built,
and produced
for lessmoney, with greater speed, and with fewer resources.
With the JavaTM Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE), development of Java ente
rprise
applications has never been easier or faster. The aimof the Java EE 5 platformis
to provide
developers a powerful set of APIs while reducing development time, reducing appl
ication
complexity, and improving application performance.
The Java EE 5 platformintroduces a simpliied programmingmodel.With Java EE 5
technology, XML deployment descriptors are now optional. Instead, a developer ca
n simply
enter the information as an annotation directly into a Java source ile, and the
Java EE server will
conigure the component at deployment and runtime. These annotations are generall
y used to
embed in a programdata that would otherwise be furnished in a deployment descrip
tor.With
annotations, the speciication information is put directly in your code next to t
he program
element that it afects.
In the Java EE platform, dependency injection can be applied to all resources th
at a component
needs, efectively hiding the creation and lookup of resources fromapplication co
de.
Dependency injection can be used in EJB containers, web containers, and applicat
ion clients.
Dependency injection allows the Java EE container to automatically insert refere
nces to other
required components or resources using annotations.
The Java Persistence API is new to the Java EE 5 platform. The Java Persistence
API provides an
object/relationalmapping formanaging relational data in enterprise beans, web co
mponents,
and application clients. It can also be used in Java SE applications, outside of
the Java EE
environment.