In a nutshell, Oracle pushed out control of the Enterprise Edition—which for non-Java developers and discussion purposes here—can be thought of as all the “heavy duty”-level facilities in the Java toolbox not provided by the base language, JVM and JDK. Or, put another way, EE provides to us mere mortal and all-too-busy developers all manner of facilities, frameworks and other useful tools to abstract away quite a bit of the drudgery that goes with building enterprise-scale software routines.