TowardsEjbThree

From SPA Wiki

The goal of this workshop was to identify and prioritize the changes developers most want to see in the forthcoming 3.0 version of the Enterprise Java Beans specification.

The afternoon was a terrific success because of the twelve people who took part. The enthusiasm and the quality of the experience they could bring meant we were overflowing with good ideas and the challenge quickly became focusing on the most important ones in our limited time.

Using pair interviews about their experiences, the delegates identified 27 distinct ideas for improving EJB. (At first the numbers seemed higher, but several ideas had been submitted by more than one pair.) As a group, we then gave a quick score to each and short-listed the top 11.

Finally, we held a "balloon debate" on these 11, where each delegate became an advocate for one idea. This allowed us to put the best ideas against each other and whittle them down to a top 6 and eventually top 3.

Here's the top 3:

• Testability - the new EJB design should facilitate testing outside the container

• Transparent Persistence - bean providers want to be able to build an object model without having to code it explicitly as EJB. They then should be able to use the objects both in EJB and in other contexts.

• Unchecked Exceptions - delegates want to eliminate the phenomenon of the container throwing checked exceptions over system-level problems. This results in boilerplate code.

Although those three rose above all others, the other three in the top six also showed strong support against stiff competition:

• Reduce the number of files - developers want to maintain a smaller number of artefacts and reduce their dependence on tools

• Single Component Interface - bean providers would like to write a single component interface and then decide later whether to make it available locally, remotely, or both

• Limit Query Result Size - bean providers want a standard (EJB QL) mechanism to limit the number of results returned in a query.

Thanks again to all who participated. I believe this is a compelling list, and the JSR-220 group will certainly take note.

Here's the terms of reference for EJB 3.0:

  http://www.jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=220

And here's me:

  http://www.scottcrawford.com

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