Migrating to EJB 3.0

Mike Keith and Debu Panda gave this talk. Both are from Oracle; Mike is the Chief Architect for TopLink, and Debu is in charge of the EJB 3.0 container.

Most of their talk was addressed to clients with pre-existing EJB 2.x logic deployed. Fortunately for NI, this number is almost 0. For new developers, he encouraged developers to just start building against EJB 3.0 as it would be available "soon" (who knows when that is).

Session Bean migration is essentially removing the callback methods and turning them back into POJI business interfaces.

Entity Bean migration is more difficult, and since we don't do Entity Beans at all at NI, I will skip this. However, this is where the new Persistence API comes into play. The new EJB 3 based persistence API is going to be a very close approximation of several current frameworks, including TopLink, Hibernate, and JDO. This persistence will be available outside the J2EE container.

The presentation wasn't rocket science, but I'm glad I got to hear Oracle's two top minds on this subject discuss their opinions.