Jakarta Enterprise Beans is one of several Java APIs for modular construction of enterprise software. EJB is a server-side software component that encapsulates business logic of an application. An EJB web container provides a runtime environment for web related software components, including computer security, Java servlet lifecycle management, transaction processing, and other web services. The EJB specification is a subset of the Java EE specification.
Jakarta EE, formerly Java Platform, Enterprise Edition and Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE), is a set of specifications, extending Java SE with specifications for enterprise features such as distributed computing and web services. Jakarta EE applications are run on reference runtimes, which can be microservices or application servers, which handle transactions, security, scalability, concurrency and management of the components they are deploying.
An application server is a server that hosts applications or software that delivers a business application through a communication protocol. For a typical web application, the application server sits behind the web servers.
A web container is the component of a web server that interacts with Jakarta Servlets. A web container is responsible for managing the lifecycle of servlets, mapping a URL to a particular servlet and ensuring that the URL requester has the correct access-rights. A web container handles requests to servlets, Jakarta Server Pages (JSP) files, and other types of files that include server-side code. The Web container creates servlet instances, loads and unloads servlets, creates and manages request and response objects, and performs other servlet-management tasks. A web container implements the web component contract of the Jakarta EE architecture. This architecture specifies a runtime environment for additional web components, including security, concurrency, lifecycle management, transaction, deployment, and other services.
Apache Tomcat is a free and open-source implementation of the Jakarta Servlet, Jakarta Expression Language, and WebSocket technologies. It provides a "pure Java" HTTP web server environment in which Java code can also run. Thus it is a Java web application server, although not a full JEE application server.
Java Management Extensions (JMX) is a Java technology that supplies tools for managing and monitoring applications, system objects, devices and service-oriented networks. Those resources are represented by objects called MBeans. In the API, classes can be dynamically loaded and instantiated. Managing and monitoring applications can be designed and developed using the Java Dynamic Management Kit.
Apache Geronimo is an open source application server developed by the Apache Software Foundation and distributed under the Apache license.
Apache Beehive is a discontinued Java Application Framework that was designed to simplify the development of Java EE-based applications. It makes use of various open-source projects at Apache, such as XMLBeans. Apache Beehive uses Java 5, including JSR-175, a facility for annotating fields, methods, and classes so that they can be treated in special ways by runtime tools. It builds on the framework developed for BEA Systems WebLogic Workshop for its 8.1 series. BEA later decided to donate the code to Apache.
GlassFish is an open-source Jakarta EE platform application server project started by Sun Microsystems, then sponsored by Oracle Corporation, and now living at the Eclipse Foundation and supported by OmniFish, Fujitsu and Payara. The supported version under Oracle was called Oracle GlassFish Server. GlassFish is free software and was initially dual-licensed under two free software licences: the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL) and the GNU General Public License (GPL) with the Classpath exception. After having been transferred to Eclipse, GlassFish remained dual-licensed, but the CDDL license was replaced by the Eclipse Public License (EPL).
EAR is a file format used by Jakarta EE for packaging one or more modules into a single archive so that the deployment of the various modules onto an application server happens simultaneously and coherently. It also contains XML files called deployment descriptors which describe how to deploy the modules.
The Spring Framework is an application framework and inversion of control container for the Java platform. The framework's core features can be used by any Java application, but there are extensions for building web applications on top of the Java EE platform. The framework does not impose any specific programming model.. The framework has become popular in the Java community as an addition to the Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) model. The Spring Framework is free and open source software.
Jakarta Persistence, also known as JPA is a Jakarta EE application programming interface specification that describes the management of relational data in enterprise Java applications.
ICEfaces is an open-source Software development kit that extends JavaServer Faces (JSF) by employing Ajax. It is used to construct rich Internet applications (RIA) using the Java programming language. With ICEfaces, the coding for interaction and Ajax on the client side is programmed in Java, rather than in JavaScript, or with plug-ins.
JBoss Operations Network is free software/open-source Java EE-based network management software. JBoss Operations Network is part of the JBoss Enterprise Middleware portfolio of software. JBoss ON is an administration and management platform for the development, testing, deployment, and monitoring of the application lifecycle. Because it is Java-based, the JBoss application server operates cross-platform: usable on any operating system that supports Java. JBoss ON was developed by JBoss, now a division of Red Hat.
The JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform is free software/open-source Java EE-based service-oriented architecture (SOA) software. The JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform is part of the JBoss Enterprise Middleware portfolio of software. The JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform enables enterprises to integrate services, handle business events, and automate business processes, linking IT resources, data, services and applications. Because it is Java-based, the JBoss application server operates cross-platform: usable on any operating system that supports Java. The JBoss SOA Platform was developed by JBoss, now a division of Red Hat.
The JBoss Enterprise Application Platform is a subscription-based/open-source Java EE-based application server runtime platform used for building, deploying, and hosting highly-transactional Java applications and services developed and maintained by Red Hat. The JBoss Enterprise Application Platform is part of Red Hat's Enterprise Middleware portfolio of software. Because it is Java-based, the JBoss application server operates across platforms; it is usable on any operating system that supports Java. JBoss Enterprise Application Platform was originally called JBoss and was developed by the eponymous company JBoss, acquired by Red Hat in 2006.
Infinispan is a distributed cache and key-value NoSQL data store software developed by Red Hat. Java applications can embed it as library, use it as a service in WildFly or any non-java applications can use it, as remote service through TCP/IP.
Imixs Workflow is an open-source project, providing technologies for building Business Process Management solutions. The project focus on human based workflows used to execute and control workflows in organisations and enterprises. In difference to task-oriented workflow engines, which focus on automated program flow control (tasks), Imixs Workflow is a representative of an event-based workflow engine. Here, the engine controls the status of a process instance within a defined state-diagram. By entering an event, the state of a process instance can be abandoned or changed. In human-centric workflow engines, events usually occur by an interaction of the actor with the system, for example by approving or rejecting a business transaction. They can also be triggered by scheduled events. An example of this is an escalation of an unfinished task.
Keycloak is an open-source software product to allow single sign-on with identity and access management aimed at modern applications and services. Until April 2023, this WildFly community project was under the stewardship of Red Hat, who use it as the upstream project for their Red Hat build of Keycloak. In April 2023, Keycloak was donated to the CNCF and joined the foundation as an incubating project.
