The event brought together representatives of companies often at odds with one another -- Sun, Oracle, SAP, JBoss, and BEA Systems -- in support of Java EE 5.

"BEA's really thrilled about the Java EE spec," said Patrick Linskey, EJB technical lead at BEA. The company plans an EJB 3 technology preview at JavaOne. Announcement of general availability of version 4.0 of the Kodo persistence engine is also expected by BEA during JavaOne.

"BEA is really going to become the place where developers are going to do all their Java EE development," said Linskey.

An SAP representative stressed the usefulness of Java in deploying SOA.

"The very fact that you have on this call people from SAP, Oracle, JBoss, and BEA all standing behind this announcement should go to show this is very critical for the role of enterprise SOA," said Aiaz Kazi, vice president of Solution Marketing for SAP NetWeaver. SAP has provided Java capabilities through its stack, he said.