Templth’s blog: “Is EJB3 a Spring killer?”: “This is one of the most asked question at this time. The EJB3 specification has incopored interesting concepts and ideas from leading open source projects to make easier to use, remove lines of code and improve the time of application development.”
Personally, I think EJB3 is still too little, too late. Even though EJB3 provides valuable simplifications with respect to previous versions, there’s very little that you can do with EJB that you cannot do — more simply — with Spring and, say, Hibernate. Besides, how far form release are EJB3 implementations? You can use Spring and Hibernate today, and they are very mature tools. When, and if, we have a comparably mature EJB3 implementation, they will probably have already outgrown the EJB3 spec in terms of functionality and ease of use.
Anyway, you can make up your mind by yourself by following the many pointers provided in Templth’s post quoted above.
The simple response: no
I have this feeling that a million developers worldwide that struggled to death just to learn how Struts works are now in panic because they have heard that there’s something cooler to build applications with: they’ve heard this thing it’s called Spring, and even before trying to look at what Spring provides, they hope it will die soon, so they won’t have to (gasp!) learn a whole new framework and will be able to stick with their beloved Struts.
This whole “ejb will kill Spring” is completely absurd to anyone that has used Spring for more than 10 minutes: I am using something more powerful than what EJB3 will ever be since october 2003, and if IBM will deliver at the usual pace we won’t have a j2ee 1.5 (or j5ee?) version of websphere before 2007.
Spring is a fatansitcally powerful and easy to use framework. However with the coming of JSF and JBOSS announcing seam that allows you to use hibernate with Jsf a lot of UI driven developers migh switch to JSF + Hibernate + stateless session for business logic + MDB for messaging, although there is talk of integrating spring MVC with JSF only time will tell how this will work out.