J2EE is a standard put forward by Sun. It consists of a list of particular API's that must be implemented by an application server. Once the application server implements all of the API's at the right level and passes a "standards compliance"
test suite it is certified as being J2EE compliant.
Kyle
P.S. In particular what IBM was missing in WAS 3.5 that kept it from being J2EE 1.2 compliant was EJB 1.1 and JavaMail.
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Kyle Brown,
Author of
Enterprise Java (tm) Programming with IBM Websphere
See my homepage at
http://members.aol.com/kgb1001001 for other WebSphere information.