EJB 3.1 — Simpler still

Here comes telemarketing veteran Horst Fuchs with his slightly dim sidekick Gáby, to demonstrate the revolutionary EJB 3.1 on his Telekrám shopping show.

Horst: Hi, Gáby.

Gáby: Hi, Horst.

Horst: Today I have a great new product, EJB 3.1. It’s even cleverer and easier to use, Gáby.

Gáby: Ohhhhhhhhh. (Gáby is speechless with amazement.)

Horst: Gáby, you no longer have to write interfaces when you don’t need them.

Gáby: No interfaces for my beans, Horst?

Horst: And that’s not all, Gáby. You can even turn your beans into singletons!

Gáby: Even singletons, Horst? (Horst nods.)

Horst: And all of it, Gáby, absolutely free!

End of the Telekrám show

Unfortunately, Horst didn’t tell our Gáby that what Roumen demonstrates next year will be in production in about five years. EJB 3.1 was news to me. Like most of you, I had no idea anybody was working on it. I mistakenly thought all the effort was going toward J2EE 6. EJB 3.1 is covered by JSR 318 and targets the following areas.

• Removal of the requirement for a separate local business interface.
• Support for direct use of EJBs in the servlet container, including simplified packaging options.
• Singleton beans.
• Support for asynchronous session bean invocation.
• Support for stateful web services via stateful session bean web service endpoints.
• Specification of concurrency options for stateful session beans.
• Application-level callback notifications, including for container initialization and shutdown.
• EJB Timer Service enhancements to support cron-like scheduling, deployment-time timer creation, and stateful session bean timed objects.
• An ejb-jar level component environment to simplify the specification of shared dependencies among components.