The platform, then, is a balance between the three forces, namely the community of the enterprise Java developers, the product providers, and of course the enterprise that must uphold the business models.

The community requires standardization in order that they can easily embrace technology without the fear of vendor lock-in. They also want to be satisfied with a sound investment in the software development for years to come.

The vendors have an interest in selling their products, services, and support to the community of users for years to come. They also want to have a platform that lowers the barriers to compete against other vendors. It is helpful for them that there is a standard to aim for, a testable certification to achieve, in which they can brand their servers.

The specification for the Full Profile edition of Java EE 7 has the following APIs:

There is also a subset of the Java EE 7 product, known as the Web Profile that only handles the web specific Java enterprise APIs. Examples of this sort of product are open source Apache Tomcat from the Apache Software Foundation, Caucho's proprietary Resin, and the ever popular open source embeddable Jetty Server. The Java EE 7 web container products have a much smaller subset of JSRs to implement.

Java Persistence, which maps entity beans, or persistence capable objects, to a relational database, is one of the most crucial and important application interfaces. JPA is a tremendous success for the portable object-relation mapping applications that works across the databases and application servers. Your code can move from one vendor's database connection to another. There is always a slight caveat emptor: there is no such thing as 100 percent portability. But without the standard framework, your developers would have to work an awful lot harder than tweaking a few database tables and configuring a different JDBC connection resource.

Portability and the future of the Java SE and EE platforms will be very important for moving your applications to the diverse, but unstandardized, cloud-computing environment. Although cloud computing was dropped from Java EE 7 late in the establishment of the specification, adopting Java EE 7 will help in the mid-term future when there is an official Java enterprise edition for the cloud. It is rather likely that in those modern utility computing environments, prospective business subscribers will welcome the ability to move from one cloud PaaS (Platform as a Service) vendor to another for a technical and/or business reason.

Standards, then, are very important to Java. It means that we can all move along in a positive direction with less fear of the unknown and that, ladies and gentlemen, is good for everybody. The API that your application code depends on is critical to its software lifecycle. Let's move on to the profiles.