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 components and framework benefits—but the component benefits were oversold. By the time EJB 2 was released, it became apparent that EJB could be used as a framework to make server-side development easier—but it was complicated. It became a heavy framework that provided features such as remoting, transaction management, security, state maintenance, persistence, and web services. It was loaded with more features with each release, and while the development tools matured, its inventors failed to address the growing complexity.

As the community became disenchanted with the limitations of EJB 2, innovative open source tools like Spring and Hibernate emerged. They, along with the creeping dominance of Microsoft.NET and the rise of scripting frameworks like Ruby on Rails, were signs of the increasing discontent with the complexities of Java. It was time for JCP and expert groups to work on the simplification of Java development. That was the sole motivation behind Java EE 5 and the goal of the EJB 3 Expert through Group.