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NFJS2025

Java/J2EE Architecture @ Work: EJB 3 vs Spring and Hibernate

You've used EJB in the past and been disappointed - it was too heavy and difficult to use. Like Bruce Tate, maybe you've gone from “Bitter” to “Better, Faster, Lighter”. With EJB 3 shipping in early 2006, maybe it's time to take another look. We'll compare EJB 3 with alternative
frameworks - Spring and Hibernate - to see if EJB 3 has closed the gap.

Spring and Hibernate seem to fill the void left by previous J2EE specifications - the need for simple development, deployment, and testing. The EJB spec committee listened to the Spring and Hibernate
communities, and the result is EJB 3. But does it deliver? With the widespread use of Spring and Hibernate, does EJB 3 matter anymore?

If you're curious about these issues, this talk is for you.
This presentation covers:

  • Architecture Overview
  • Architectural Issues (Transactions, Connection Pooling, Configuration)
  • The Problems with EJB 2.1 (and earlier)
  • Improvements in EJB 3
  • EJB 3 limitations
  • Spring - Everything You Always Wanted
  • Session Beans versus Spring Beans
  • Hibernate
  • CMP Entity Beans versus Hibernate
  • What Spring and Hibernate don't have
  • Testability Issues - In-Container & Out-of-Container

We'll walk through each issue and debate the pros and cons. Just like an eye doctor appointment, we'll try to answer - “Which is better: technology 1 or 2?“

Intended audience: Experienced Java/J2EE/Spring/Hibernate developers and architects


Tom Marrs

About Tom Marrs

Tom Marrs is a Technical Architect at Perficient, where he specializes in RESTful Web Services and Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). He designs and implements mission-critical web and business applications using the latest SOA, Ruby on Rails, JSON, HTML5, JavaScript, Java/EE, and Open Source technologies.

Tom is the author of the JSON Refcard for DZone, and the upcoming book, JSON at Work for O’Reilly. Tom is also a speaker at the Great Indian Developer Summit (GIDS) conference.

An active participant in the local technical community, Tom helps emcee at the HTML5 Denver User Group, helped found the Denver Open Source User Group (DOSUG), has served as President of the Denver Java Users Group (DJUG), and speaks at other local user groups.

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