EJB 3.0 in a Nutshell

Rusty Nuts writes "JavaWorld has a great article on the future of Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB). Are you frustrated learning EJB 2.1 or already know EJBs but loathe its complexities? Hold on a bit more for the the future of EJBs is looking brighter for you."

Comments

Re:Book recommendations

[ekuns]

The most obvious reason for using J2EE that I can see (perhaps the only reason for the great majority of apps) is JMS. Other than that, most of the J2EE stuff is much too heavyweight for most applications.

Re:ejb3 sounds like a hack

[mike_sucks]

I think a lot of the changes in 1.5 are a response to C#. But I don't think this is a bad thing, and if you don't use the new constructs and APIs and provided you don't tell the compliler to target 1.5 only, then any code you write in 1.5 will be backwards compatible.

Also, I think annotations do belong with the class/method/field rather than in the comment. XDoclet is an excellent product but the only reason they overloaded the use of @tags in comments is because they couldn't put them in the actual source without breaking every Java tool out there. The JCP /can/ make this change and so they did. It would be great to see XDoclet supporting 1.5-style annotations, because that's where they belong.

I think you need to keep in mind that Sun is a commercial entity, they need to make money and so they need to keep up with the competition. The EJB3 spec is a response to the competition they are getting from various groups, including Microsoft. It's not about control, it's about competition.

No one is making you use v3 EJBs, so if you prefer using XDoclet and Hibernate, go for it! I personly only use the web-tier whenever possible because there usually isn't much need for the middle tier. But please don't complain about competition, it's a good thing. The EJB3 spec will only drive XDoclet and Hibernate guys to make their products better!