Jakarta EE is the standard platform for building enterprise applications in Java. Rather than a single product, it is a collection of specifications that define APIs and behavior for server-side concerns such as handling HTTP requests, generating web pages, persisting data to relational databases, managing transactions, and composing business components. Vendors then ship compatible implementations, and applications written to the specifications can, in principle, run on any conforming server.
The platform began life under Sun Microsystems as J2EE (Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition) in the late 1990s, was later renamed Java EE, and was governed for years through the Java Community Process. Its core specifications became foundational to enterprise software: Jakarta Servlet, a server-side API for handling HTTP requests and responses; Jakarta Pages (formerly JavaServer Pages, JSP), a template engine for web content; Jakarta Persistence (JPA), which standardizes object-relational mapping; and Jakarta Enterprise Beans (EJB), an architecture for component-based business applications. Around these sit many more specifications covering RESTful web services, dependency injection, validation, messaging, and security.
The move to the Eclipse Foundation marks the platform’s most important governance change. After Oracle acquired Sun, it transferred Java EE to the Eclipse Foundation in 2017, where the technology was re-launched under the new name Jakarta EE through an open, vendor-neutral process. Because Oracle retained the “javax” namespace and the Java trademark, the project had to rename its package namespaces from “javax” to “jakarta,” a disruptive but clarifying break that signaled community stewardship of the platform’s future.
The specifications themselves are the heart of the standard. Each defines an API contract and a compatibility test suite, so that an implementation can be certified as conforming. This separation of specification from implementation is what allowed a competitive market of application servers to exist, and what let application code remain portable across them. The model also created space for lighter-weight alternatives: frameworks like the Spring Framework arose partly as a reaction to the complexity of early EJB, and many ideas they pioneered, such as annotation-driven configuration and POJO-based components, fed back into later versions of the platform.
Jakarta EE remains a defining reference point for server-side Java. Even projects that do not adopt the full platform routinely build on individual Jakarta specifications such as Servlet and Persistence, and ORM tools like Hibernate implement the JPA standard. As an openly governed, multi-vendor specification, Jakarta EE continues to shape how enterprise Java applications are structured and how they interoperate.