Debu Panda>>The biggest threat to J2EE is its complexity and the perception that it is not as productive as Microsoft .NET. The good news is that J2EE vendors like Oracle, IBM, etc. are working diligently to improve their tools offerings and provide RAD environments to make Java developers productive.  

The other problem I see is the commoditization of J2EE by open source communities. Only application servers with differentiators and complete middleware along with core J2EE and backed by large companies will be able survive in the current market. So my advice is to invest wisely when choosing your application server

IndicThreads>>Here I would like our readers to note two very useful contributions by Debu. TheUnofficial EJB 3.0 (JSR-220) FAQand his articleSimplifying EJB Development with EJB 3.0. Before IndicThreads readers check out your articles, a quick word about what?s special in EJB 3.0?

Debu Panda>>The main goal for EJB 3.0 is to simplify life for developers by taking a lot of complexities out of their way. It also aims to simplify CMP entity beans and standardize a persistence model for J2EE and J2SE similar to Oracle TopLink and Hibernate.

Here are few things done in EJB 3.0 to make this simpler than the current model:

• Removed need for building the EJB interfaces and generating the deployment descriptors and provided developers the ability to generate these by specifying annotations as in JSR 175. This will free developers from:
  • Creating deployment descriptors
  • Building component Interfaces
• Simplified EJBs to resemble POJOs or Java Beans.
• Eliminated requirement to have component interfaces for EJBs.
• The entity beans do not require any component interfaces.
• The session beans will use a Plain Old Java Interface
• Eliminated requirement to implement unnecessary callback methods.

To learn more about EJB 3.0, read the EJB 3.0 Draft specification. My articleSimplifying EJB Development with EJB 3.0 provides an overwiew of the few features coming in EJB 3.0.

"Oracle has the

best persistence product

(Oracle TopLink)

in the industry"