Why is Migration Necessary?

Although J2EE specifications broadly cover requirements for applications, they are nonetheless evolving standards. They either do not cover some aspects of applications or leave implementation details to the application providers.

This leads to different implementations of the application servers, also well as difference in the deployment of J2EE components on application servers. The array of available configuration and deployment tools for use with any particular application server product also contributes to the product implementation differences.

The evolutionary nature of the specifications itself presents challenges to application providers. Each of the component APIs are also evolving. This leads to a varying degree of conformance by products. In particular, an emerging product, such as the Application Server, has to contend with differences in J2EE application components, modules, and files deployed on other established application server platforms. Such differences require mappings between earlier implementation details of the J2EE standard, such as file naming conventions, and messaging syntax.

Moreover, product providers usually bundle additional features and services with their products. These features are available as custom JSP tags or proprietary Java API libraries. Unfortunately, using these proprietary features renders these applications non-portable.