This past year the J2EE 1.4 specification enjoyed increased adoption by the industry, with most major application server vendors having released their J2EE 1.4 products and more and more enterprises upgrading their application servers and production applications to comply with it.
Apart from merely upgrading, there's a natural desire to leverage the primary focus of J2EE 1.4 - its support for service oriented architectures and Web services - and make it benefit the business by exposing the business logic of J2EE applications in a way that makes them portably accessible from the various heterogeneous environments that are around today.
Here at Compuware (the company I work for) we chose to make the ability to generate J2EE 1.4 applications one of the top requirements of the upcoming version of our OptimalJ product, an MDA-based development product that enables you to generate (from user-defined models) complex, standards-compliant J2EE 1.3 and J2EE 1.4 applications that run on JBoss, WebSphere, and WebLogic.
