JavaEE Standards and Terminologies

Standards

Standards are good. They allow us to create an application that is not tied to a certain environment, runtime, or vendor.

Consider JVM, which is standardized. We can write and compile it on one OS (e.g. Windows) and run it on any other supported OS (e.g. Linux). Furthermore, consider SQL and how we can retrieve data from the database, regardless of the vendor.

There is always a struggle between the slow process of defining a standard and implementing it and the fast-responding framework. Standards are also created when a technology or way of working has proven itself over time, or after enough expertise is gathered around a topic to develop best practices.

Although there are elements of security available in older versions of Java EE, Java EE 8, released in September 2018, launched an overall security specification, the Security API specification.

The best way to illustrate this is through the example given below. This example shows the different ways of retrieving the current user. Each Jakarta EE part has its methods.