A shorter slide-deck highlighting the new features in JSR 322: Java EE Connector Architecture 1.6 Technology.
See http://blogs.sun.com/sivakumart/entry/java_ee_connector_architecture_1 for the announcement of the JSR release and http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=322 for the JSR.
This presentation has speaker notes
The Java EE Connector Architecture defines a standard architecture for connecting to heterogeneous enterprise information systems (EIS), such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), mainframe transaction processing and database systems from the Java EE platform. Ease of Development. Developing resource adapters has never been easier through the introduction of metadata annotations, obviating the need for ra.xml(deployment descriptor), better defaults, reducing the number of interfaces to implement etc. Generic work context contract . A generic contract that enables a resource adapter to control the execution context of a Work instance that it has submitted to the application server for execution. The Generic work contract provides the mechanism for a resource adapter to augment the runtime context of a Work instance with additional contextual information flown-in from the EIS. Security work context. A standard contract that enables a resource adapter to establish security information while submiting a Work instance for execution to a WorkManager and while delivering messages to message endpoints residing in the application server. This contract provides a mechanism to support the execution of a Work instance in the context of an established identity. It also supports the propagation of user information/Principal information from an EIS to a MessageEndpoint during Message Inflow. In short: This contract now enables an end-to-end security model for Java EE application-EIS integration Standalone Connector Container: Like “EJB Lite” in Java EE 6 , minimum set of requirements for a connector container is defined so that it can be used in a non-classic(Full) profile. Miscellaneous improvements in various contracts defined in the spec such as Work Management, Message Inflow, Transaction Management
- The Connectors 1.6 spec was developed as part of JSR 322 - Reference Implementation is at GlassFish v3 - Siva and Binod are spec leads and often blog about the spec. Jagadish is the RI lead and writes about GlassFish's Connectors implementation.