For those of you who were eagerly awaiting (who wasn't?) the approval and ratification of the JEE 5 specification, and more specifically EJB 3, here is a free book on the subject which can be downloaded from here. Hope you find it useful (at least is free!).

It remains to be seen whether JEE 5 will catch on with the developer community at-large when other (lightweight) alternatives already exist (a.k.a. Spring) that have made great strides and proven successful in terms of productivity and overall quality. There have been some threads already questioning the future of JEE in general.

I do however think that JEE 5 does bring some good things to the table. To name a couple:

• Simplified web services implementation (JAX-WS, annotation-driven)
• Java Persistent API (JPA)

Having a platform for implementing and deploying web services to in such a simple manner obviuosly plays huge in this SOA-crazed world.

I'm actually looking forward to have the opportunity to use JPA and see how it compares with other ORM frameworks such as Hibernate (classic), and that other forsaken standard (JDO 2). From a vendor's perspective, and even the open source world, JPA is gathering a lot of steam. Oracle (TopLink), BEA (Kodo, OpenJPA), and JBoss (Hibernate 3.2) already support this standard. Note that even though JPA is part of the latest EJB spec, you don't need a JEE container to use it. It's meant to be used on JSE applications as well.