Spring and EJB 3 Integration

I attended another excellent SF JUG meeting earlier this month. It was a double billing with Talip Ozturk talking about Hazelcast, an opensource clustering and data distribution platform, and Reza Rehman speaking about EJB3 and Spring Integration.

Reza is the author of EJB3 in Action and an accomplished speaker whom I had the chance to meet at The Server Side Symposium earlier this year, so I was particularly interested in his talk.

Reza gave some background on EJBs and how they have been completely reinvented as part of the latest (EJB3) release, including using 100% annotations (no xml) and making heavy use intelligent defaulting. He also talked about how Spring became popular as an alternative to the heavyweigth approach of the older EJB releases and has thrived through its focus on integration with standards like JPA, JMS, JDBC and JAX-WS.

He then went on to his main point, which was that EJB3 and Spring can now be viewed as complimentary, rather than competing, technologies and he went on to back this up by discussing the integration strategies that can be used, including

• Embedding Spring inside a Java EE app server
• Embedding an EJB3 embeddable container withing Tomcat with Spring
• Enabling Spring @Autowired annotation in EJBs via Interceptors
• Using EJB3 natively inside Spring using Spring Pitchfork

Reza finished by reiterating the benefits of using Spring and EJBs together to increase ease of coding and vendor neutrality.

Overall, I thought it was an insightful presentation from Reza. I had studied EJBs back in the v2 release as part of the my SCEA certification, and have used Spring in several projects, but this was the first time I had a chance to hear how they can be used together.

I have made Reza’s presentation notes available here, as well as his demo source code available here. You can also follow him on his web site and blog at: www.rahmannet.net.

Tags: EJBs, JUG, spring