Future Enhancements (Enterprise JavaBeans)

11.6. Future Enhancements

There are several areas that are targeted for improvement in the next major release of the J2EE specification. Interoperability is perhaps the most important issue to be addressed. Interoperability will be improved by requiring support of IIOP as the RMI protocol for EJB, because IIOP does a decent job of handling transaction propagation between servers. Security, however, will offer its own challenges as the specification authors tackle problems concerned with negotiating security policies between environments.

The use of the Java Authorization and Authentication Service ( JAAS) may be specified for client components, which would make them more portable. A J2EE SPI may be defined, which will offer vendors some level of pluggable services. This will make it easier to use one vendor's servlet container with another vendor's EJB container. The J2EE SPI will surely include a connector specification that allows legacy systems to be plugged into a J2EE platform, so that connections to resources like ERP (SAP, PeopleSoft, etc.) systems can be managed and accessed in the same fashion as JDBC, JavaMail, and JMS.