The first draft of the EJB 3.1 specification is out

When I was having a little fun with EJB 3.1 last time, I wouldn’t have dreamed that the first draft of the specification would see the light of day so soon.

If you missed the announced features, here they are again at a glance. The linked article has the details.

• .war packaging of EJB components
• Optional Local Business Interfaces
• Portable EJB Global JNDI Names
• Singletons
• EJB “Lite”
• EJB Timer Service Enhancements
• Simple Asynchrony

I’ll use a slightly more conciliatory tone today. I was very skeptical about EJB 3.1 and thought nobody needed the technology, but I have to admit it could solve a lot of current problems in EE. Every simplification is welcome, and in deployment it’s more than just good news. If EJB “Lite” really is light, we might see it in Tomcat or Jetty, or even implemented directly by Spring.

Two things dampen my enthusiasm. First is how long it will take for EJB 3.1 to reach production. How many of your applications can use J2EE 5? Ours still run on J2EE 1.4, and it was a struggle just to get a move to the standard Java 5 line approved. The second is portability. As with other standards, specifications have gray areas and compatibility tests don’t catch everything. The only thing you can probably count on everywhere is the Servlet API.

I tried to think about what EJB 3.1 will mean for Spring. The popular question that stirs up a lot of emotion is whether EJB 3.1 will spell the end of Spring. I don’t think so. EJB 3.1 will simplify things you still have to deal with in Spring, such as deployment and portable JNDI names.

Spring is already certified for widely used commercial application servers such as WebSphere and WebLogic. EJB Lite, a sort of subset of the EJB 3.1 API, offers a way for Spring to gain an even more official foothold in those servers. The same goes for open-source solutions.

Related articles

• The New Features in EJB 3.1 — Part 2

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