Far from taking Java to new heights, Sun Microsystems' latest platform specification is a nail in the coffin of enterprise Java.

That's according to analyst house the Burton Group, whose latest report, JEE5: the Beginning of the End of Java EE, predicts the death of enterprise Java within the next five years.

According to Burton, Java EE 5.0 has failed to deliver on the promise of reducing enterprise Java's notorious complexity and Java EE is risking extinction with the rise of more flexible programming platforms such as Ruby on Rails.

Senior analyst Richard Monson-Haefel reportedly said the failure of Sun and others to address complexity means Java EE will go the way of the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA). "In five years, Java EE will be the CORBA of the 21st Century," Monson-Haefel said.

According to Monson-Haefel: "JEE5 fails to save Java EE... it's a harbinger of Java EE as the dominant enterprise platform."

Burton's report will no doubt make compelling reading for fans of scripting languages, who recently flamed Java father James Gosling for blogging that Ruby and similar languages are "light" and unsuited to the kinds of enterprise scenarios reserved for Java. Sun billed Java EE as its biggest update to enterprise Java in six years with major improvements to the programming model, service oriented architecture (SOA) support and simplified creation of web services.

Sun has preferred to sidestep talk of complexity in Java EE and tout simplicity provided in tools, instead. ®