Packt Publishing have recently released two new books of interest to Java EE developers.
EJB 3.1 Cookbook and Java EE6 With NetBeans 7 both look like good reads and Packt have graciously agreed to send me a copy of each of these books for review, which I’ll post on the site as soon as I’ve reviewed them.
Thanks to Nicole for sorting this out for me.
There’s an interesting thread going on over at The Server Side based upon a comment made by Ugo Cei – “I seriously wonder why anyone would want to develop anything substantial in Java nowadays without using Spring.”
Having done J2EE applications using both “traditional” approaches (i.e. EJB 2.x) and more lightweight approaches (e.g. Spring), I’d choose the more lightweight approach every time. Probably the majority of J2EE applications don’t need the full J2EE stack and Spring provides all the tools necessary to get the job done. As I mentioned in a previous post, when I’ve done projects without using Spring, I’ve missed not having dependency injection (why should I really care about getting a database connection?).
EJB 3 looks interesting however, yet there is a large momentum with Spring at the moment, so I don’t see either technology toppling the other. I think both technologies will co-exists side by side.
I’ve just taken my first steps in EJB3 and started writing some small sample applications so that I can get up to speed on it.
I’ve been doing J2EE for some time now so I thought I’d have a look at the new EJB 3 stuff and see how it differs. I’m a fan of JBoss, which provides a version of EJB3 on JBoss 4.0.3RC1. The EJB3 support can also be ported to run on JBoss 4.0.2.
Installing JBoss with EJB3 support is a doddle. I used the webstart installer on the JBoss website and installation proceeded smoothly without any problems. During the installation, you are asked which configuration of JBoss you want (all, default, ejb3 etc.). Both the all and ejb3 configurations provide EJB3 support.
So far, I’ve primarily been looking at Session beans. I’m impressed at the lack of verbose XML that needs to be written to deploy the beans (i.e. there was none!). The lack of boilerplate code required to develop these beens is very impressive, in fact my ant script was by far the most complex thing in my sample project.
I’ll post some more comments as I delve deeper, but so far I’m impressed and I think EJB3 is a large leap forwards in J2EE