Java Enterprise Edition 6 has been released

The specification for Java Enterprise Edition v. 6 has been released. This major upgrade introduces many new features to ease Web and Enterprise applications development. The list of the technologies included in this release can be view here. Besides upgrades to veteran specifications such as Servlet, JSP and EJB, the Java EE platform introduces:

• Java API for RESTful Web Services: an annotation-based API to easily convert a POJO and publish its logic as a RESTful web service.
• Managed Beans 1.0: Java EE containers can now manage ordinary Java classes with few (or no) restrictions (POJOs). Managed bean support lifecycle events, injection and interceptors. Other specification are, such as Web Beans), are built upon managed beans.
• Contexts and Dependency Injection for Java (Web Beans 1.0): The CDI specification, built upon managed beans, provides the well-known JBoss Seam's Web Beans functionality to the Java EE platform: a sophisticated context and dependency injection model.
• Bean Validation: An annotation-based API to declare validation constraints on a POJO and a validation API to programmatically validate bean instances.

If you want to start and try this new platform, download the Java EE SDK or download NetBeans, whose version 6.8 integrates Java EE 6 support and Glassfish Enterprise Server 3.0.