News

JBoss to Roll out EJB 3.0 in Three New Products

• By John K. Waters
• June 21, 2005

Developers are justifiably eager for the forthcoming Enterprise JavaBeans 3.0 specification (due with J2EE 5.0), says Pierre Fricke. EJB 3.0 overhauls the Enterprise JavaBean architecture that drives business logic and persistence for J2EE applications, simplifying the programming model to significantly improve developer productivity.

“J2EE hasn’t yet fully realized its potential because of the EJB 2.O programming model,” Fricke says. “Hence the rise of EJB 3.0, which is finally what J2EE and EJB should have been about to begin with: a simple JavaBean focused on business logic.”

Fricke is, himself, a bit keyed up about the advent of the spec. He is the newly appointed director of product management at commercial open-source middleware provider JBoss, which is set to roll out its own EJB 3.0 implementation across new versions of three key products: the JBoss Application Server 4, Hibernate 3 and JBoss Eclipse IDE 1.5.

Fricke says that JBoss is making EJB 3.0 a cornerstone of the JBoss Enterprise Middleware System. The JEMS platform includes the JBoss app server, the Hibernate object-relational mapping software, the Tomcat JSP and Servlet Web container, the jBPM workflow engine, the JBoss Cache caching technology, the JGroups multicast communications toolkit and the Eclipse IDE.

JBoss's EJB 3.0 implementation will follow the company’s modular, lightweight development philosophy, Fricke says. Programmers will be able to take advantage of EJB 3.0 in these new product releases by mixing and matching pieces of the JEMS for everything from a simple Java application to a complex J2EE application.

"We believe that there’s going to be a significant attraction to and uptake of this EJB 3.0 programming model over the next six months to a year," Fricke says. "While these movements of skills and people do take time, we think this is going to be a faster shift, because EJB 3.0 is going to make programmers lives a lot easier by enabling them to do their jobs quicker and with less cost."

The new products will support the EJB 3.0 spec in several ways:

• The JBoss Application Server 4 gets developers started with EJB 3.0 and JavaServer Faces. They can create Web applications using JSF, create the business logic with EJB 3.0, and persist data through the EJB 3.0 Java Persistence API. Also included: a graphical installer.
• Hibernate 3 will offer support for EJB 3.0 Annotations, Entity Manager and the Java Persistence API.
• The JBoss Eclipse IDE 1.5 introduces EJB 3.0 and Hibernate Tools that simplify development. New features include an EJB 3.0 project wizard, a full port of the Hibernate console to Eclipse to provide integrated HQL query execution and result-set browsing, a Hibernate XML mapping file editor and a wizard for reverse engineering database schemas.

JBoss's EJB 3.0 implementations are expected in these new product releases by the end of June. The company plans to demo the new products at the upcoming JavaOne conference using its new TrailBlazer learning application, which takes developers on a guided tour through the new EJB 3.0 features.