The JCP has been active of late, issuing many public drafts of various relevant specifications, including the
Servlet 3.0 draft, the
JavaServer Faces 2.0 draft, the
Java Connector Architecture 1.6 draft, and the
Service Data Objects draft.
Each JSR is significant in its own way.
The Servlet 3.0 JSR focuses on web framework pluggability, annotation support, async and Comet support (which has caused some discussion here on TSS and in the JSR itself!), security, alignment with the REST JSR, and other clarifications, such as file upload progress listeners and some threadsafe clarifications.
The JSF 2.0 changes are very significant for the specification, focusing on component development, annotation support, tag management, and a standardized mechanism to provide Javascript support. This expert group has been
very busy.
The Java Connector Architecture adds some classloader changes, distributed work processing, bean validation, and other fairly minor changes (although it's certain that the expert group will dispute the description as "minor.")
The Service Data Objects draft has been in progress since 2003, and is a mechanism to "pass data between a business tier and a persistence tier. The persistence tier is responsible for encapsulating the access to whatever persistent data storage mechanism is being used. The Service Data Object represents the data in a way that is independent of the underlying persistence technology," from the
JSR page.
