The Java Community Process (JCP) executive committee earlier this week announced the approval of the Java Specification Request (JSR) for the next release of the Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) 7 -- JSR 342. Java EE 7 is being aimed directly at deployment within cloud environments, so the committee is no doubt eager to push through enhancements to enable this.

Java EE 7 based applications and products will (in theory) now be able to more easily operate on private or public clouds and deliver their functionality as a service with support for features such as multi-tenancy and elasticity (horizontal scaling).

As part of the Java EE 7 submission, the JCP also approved JSR 340 for Java Servlet 3.1, JSR 341 for Expression Language 3.0, JSR 343 for Java Message Service 2.0, and JSR 344 for Java Server Faces 2.2.

"SAP welcomes the news that the JSR 342 has been unanimously approved by the Executive Committee and we are pleased to see the Java community come together to jointly work on Java EE 7 within the JCP," said Björn Goerke, SVP technology and innovation platform core, SAP AG. "Java is already widely used in cloud environments, so it's important that Java EE 7 standards evolve into a modern technology foundation that satisfies the growing demand for a viable standards-based programming model choice for the cloud."

This latest submission complements two Java EE 7 related JSRs previously approved by the JCP – JSR 338 for Java Persistence API 2.1 and JSR 339 for Java API for Restful Web Services. Additional JSRs within the Java EE platform will also be submitted for approval by their specification leads.