The Java 2, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) platform is employed widely by organizations implementing enterprise applications. It is commonly used in business-to-consumer and most recently in Web service deployments. Most of the largest business organizations today have deployed applications on a J2EE platform.
While the J2EE specification is implemented by a number of large and small vendors, there is no open source J2EE container available with a BSD or BSD-derived licence nor is there an open source project today that provides a fully compliant implementation. Verifiable compliance with the J2EE specification is important to business because it ensures that applications deployed by developers are portable and interoperable across J2EE providers. As a result organizations large and small have felt compelled to pay thousands of dollars to commercial vendors in order to deploy applications based on J2EE compliant servers.
The Apache foundation supports several projects that implement pieces of the J2EE platform such as Servlets, JSP, Tag Libraries, and a Web services stack. However, Apache does not currently support a J2EE project.
The aim of the project is to produce a large and healthy community of J2EE developers tasked with the development of an open source, certified J2EE server which is ASF licensed and passes Sun's TCK reusing the best ASF/BSD licensed code available today and adding new code to complete the J2EE stack.
