For a long time, the Java EE security system has had a quite cool, but   woefully underused, feature; pluggable authorization modules. The authorization modules are provided by a specification called Java Authorization Contract for Containers, aka  JACC. 

 

A REST Service in Java EE can be created using JAX-RS. The contents of such service can be consumed using ordinary HTTP requests to a URL. URLs are typically kept simple and have a logical pattern, so it's easy to type them manually in e.g. a browser. This is different from SOAP, which essentially uses HTTP as well, but is designed to be rather complex and therefor making it not so easy to quickly test something in a browser.

 

If you're building a REST service, then that REST service will expose some kind of data or will allow some kind of interactions with a server. For instance, consider a Facebook REST service that allows you to retrieve your chat history. Naturally you don't want just anyone looking at that history, hence the need for security.

 

JSF is a component oriented MVC (Model View Controller) framework that's a part of Java EE. It comes with a small set of basic components (widgets), a templating engine, and facilities for converting and validating input. JSF strongly builds on other APIs in Java EE. Request handling is build on top of the Servlet API, binding UI components to Java code is mostly done via Java EE's Expression Language, with the Java code being (named) CDI beans. Validation is often delegated to Bean Validation.

Payara Server and Payara Micro 5.182 are here, the second release of the Payara Platform 5 series.

For a long time Payara, a derivative of GlassFish, could be used in Eclipse using the Oracle GlassFish Tools. With the release of Payara 5, a few problems prevented the plug-in from recognizing Payara 5, meaning Payara 5 couldn’t really be used in Eclipse. A new set of tools again makes it possible to use Payara 5 with Eclipse, along with other improvements.

We're excited to announce that the second Alpha release of Payara Server 5 is now available for download! We highly encourage you to give it a go, test it out and let us know what further improvements are needed. 

 

We're excited to announce that the first Alpha release of Payara Server 5 is now available for download! We highly encourage you to give it a go, test it out and let us know what further improvements are needed. 

 

Since Java EE 6 it's possible to define data sources in a portable way.

This does mean though that the data source is embedded in the application archive. For some use cases, this is exactly what's needed, but for others it may not be ideal.