Preface

In its early days, EJB was inspired by the distributed computing ideas of technologies such as CORBA and was intended to add scalability to server-side applications. EJB and J2EE enjoyed some of the greatest buzz in the industry during the dot.com boom.

The initial goal for EJB was to provide a simpler alternative to CORBA through the benefits of a standard development framework and reusable components. By the time EJB 2 was released, it became apparent that the EJB framework could become the new standard for server-side development. The framework provided Enterprise developers with everything they needed—remoting, transaction management, security, state maintenance, persistence, and web services—but it was heavyweight, requiring developers to focus more on the framework itself than on the requirements of their business applications. Because EJB was loaded with more features, its inventors failed to address its growing complexity.