is targeted for release in the third quarter of next year. "What our main goal is, is making the Java EE platform ready for use in the cloud so that you can deploy your Java EE apps into a cloud environment," said Linda DeMichiel, Oracle Java EE platform lead, at the Jax conference in San Jose, Calif. She also offered a glimpse of a subsequent Java EE 8 release, which would be fully modular and be tuned for use in SaaS (software-as-a-service) cloud computing.

With PaaS, Java EE would provide the runtime environment for running a Java application in the cloud. PaaS backing in Java EE 7 would entail evolutionary change, with support for multi-tenancy, small programming models, and new platform roles. "To enable multi-tenancy, obviously containers and resource managers are going to need to cooperate," in terms of passing along tenant identifiers and providing isolation among the tenants, DeMIchiel said. APIs useful to a cloud environment would be added in Java EE 7, including JCache, for temporary in-memory caching of Java objects, and JAX-RS, which is a Java API for RESTful access to services.

"We expect applications will need to declare themselves as cloud-enabled," DeMichiel said. "This may impose additional restrictions on what application code might be able to do."

In addition to its PaaS capabilities, Java EE 7 is set to have limited support for SaaS, in which an application can support multiple tenants but each tenant gets a separate instance of an application. Oracle sees SaaS as the ability to deploy a cloud application where the application can serve multiple customers or tenants. Roles planned for inclusion in Java EE 7 include a cloud provider, such as Java EE product or PaaS provider, along with cloud customer roles, such as application administrator or end user.