Since its inception, the Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) technology has been a bit of an enigma. While almost all other Java/J2EE (now Java EE) technologies seem to be quite important, somehow knowing how to work with EJB has always been something to be proud about. If someone claims that she has experience in J2EE technologies only to discover that it excludes EJB, the experience in J2EE is more often than not considered as irrelevant.