It has been an interesting week in the J2EE space.
We have seen public draft’s for some of the most popular standards, EJB 2.1, and JSP 2.0. What is new?

EJB 2.1:

Here we see the addition of:

• The timer interface (cron meets EJB)
• More linkage to Web Services (easily allowing web service clients to the EJBs)
• Generalization of MDBs (not just JMS you know!)
• EJB-QL is enhanced (finally: ORDER BY, but are these additions enough?)

Spec: http://java.sun.com/products/ejb/docs.html

Chat: http://www.theserverside.com/home/thread.jsp?thread_id=14053

JSP 2.0:

Suddenly JSP jumped from 1.2 -> 2.0 (previously known as 1.3).
Some of the big changes are:

• The inclusion of the EL (shared with JSR 52)
• The new JSP Fragments (more formal JSP componentization)
• The new .tag idea, allowing custom tags to be defined
  using a JSP interface, not the Java interface
  Tags can be placed in WEB-INF/tags, allowing us to bypass
  the URI declaration

• <include-prelude> allows you to include JSPs at the beginning of a set of JSPs (by url-pattern)
• <include-coda> allows you to include JSPs at the end of a set of JSPs

Spec: http://jcp.org/aboutJava/communityprocess/review/jsr152/index.html

Chat: http://www.theserverside.com/home/thread.jsp?thread_id=14091

JSTL Jakarta Release: http://jakarta.apache.org/builds/jakarta-taglibs/releases/standard

Lots of new stuff to learn. again. :)

Do these new specs give you what you want? Should they have more, or less scope?