Conclusion
Modern web-based software is maturing quickly. In spite of this, it’s still all too often extremely difficult to build what amounts to just a few GUI pages, some back-end business logic, and a persistence service layer. Such a state of affairs is like a hefty tax on any organization that needs software as a substantial part of its business model.
While some of the open source offerings (such as Spring and Hibernate) are both powerful and innovative, they address only one facet of the broader problem. I’ve often argued that we’re now in a post-technology era, where solutions are needed more than pure technology. With this in mind, EJB3 seems to tick many of the boxes in such a post-technology environment. EJB3 provides many of the programmatic services needed for heavyweight enterprise software development without making for an integration nightmare. Will it catch on? I hope so, and I hope it matures quickly and helps to reduce the current state of fragmentation in the software world.
In this article, I’ve discussed an end-to-end EJB3 code example and how to deploy this on JBoss5. This is surprisingly easy to do on a small scale. Obviously, when you try to write a bigger system you’ll run into the usual integration issues. But, EJB3 offers a kind of one-stop shop that may help to reduce the problems that currently take too much time away from software development.
I hope my article has to some extent demystified the areas of EJB3 and JBoss5 and provided you with a starting point for delving more deeply into these important topics.