One of the challenges in spec development is how to best leverage other specs that are being developed simultaneously, within the real-life constraints of schedules, resources, time-zones, etc. This is another situation where transparency and open-source is helping significantly - plus the usual hard work of the EGs. A case in point is EJB 3.1 and JAX-RS 1.1 where the EGs have been working to allow the use of POJO sesion beans as resource (root) or provider classes in Jersey, deployed as a plain WAR. This allows very natural Java programming, things like this root class

@Stateless @Path("ssb") public class StatelessSessionRootResource { @Context private UriInfo ui; @GET public String get() { return "GET: " + ui.getRequestUri().toASCIIString(); } }

Check out full details in Paul's Glassfish v3, EJB 3.1 and Jersey and in Ken's JAX-RS and EJB.

EJB3.1 and JAX-RS are two of the new JavaEE6 features you will be able to try GFv3 in EA by JavaOne - see you there! And the photo? Another great partnership, this one in Mixed Doubles in Badminton: Kim Dong-moon and Ra Kyung-min :-)

The EJB 3.1 Expert Group has released the Proposed Final Draft. Changes in this draft include Improved portable Local Session Bean lookups, Timezone support for calendar-based timers and Spec-defined stateful session bean timeouts

EJB3.1 (and .lite) are key pieces of Java EE 6 and this announcement is an important step towards that release. Check out Ken's writeup and provide feedback to the Expert Group.

GlassFish users probably take EJB 3, JPA, and dependency injection for granted but with others application servers reaching Java EE 5 compliance, Adam Bien's article on EJB 3 at JavaWorld is very timely. The article discusses how EJB 3 streamlines enterprise development and make them an appropriate technology for large but also small and midrange applications.

Adam states that "(EJB's) are in fact the only vendor-neutral and portable solution for enterprise server-side applications" and goes on to contrast EJB 3 with previous versions from a developer perspective. The article describes how lookups and factories are replaced with dependency injection, the POJO + annotation approach, but also covers the use of ejb-jar.xml as well as interceptors (described here as lightweight AOP).

The article concludes with EJB 3.1 upcoming enhancements such as easier packaging (WAR), no-interface views, singletons, etc... Make sure you try the EJB 3.1 preview available from the update center of GlassFish v3 "Prelude".