Here’s a concise white paper on what’s new with the latest release of Java Enterprise Edition. I recommend reading it.
And here’s a jist of things:
- Web Profiles - For the light weight web apps where you don’t need a full blown container.
- Servlet 3.0 - Annotation based, with support for web fragments and asynchronous processing (AJAX just got better).
- JAX -RS - Restful web services are here.