News & Events

Christian Dupuis shows how the Pitchfork project developed by Interface21 and BEA allows you to run EJB 3 Session beans inside TomCat, including support for EJB 3 annotations such as @Interceptors and all the JEE 5 JSR-250 Common-Annotations for resource injection and the like.

In development scenario where you need to develop/run EJB 3 code, or use the JSR-250 Common-Annotations, you will now be able to take adavantage of Spring's significantly enhanced dependency injection and AOP capabilities as compared to those offered by the base JEE 5 / EJB 3 specs themselves.

As an aside, the Pitchfork project raises the question of whether Interface21 (and the Spring project) endorses the EJB 3 programming model. This project simply does what Spring has always done, enable developer choice. Spring has always made it easy to develop EJBs for developers who chose to do so, and the pure EJB 3 model is not enough, if you do need to use it. Meanwhile, Spring 2.0 continues to display innovation and leadership in the POJO programming model. The EJB 3.0 session bean model’s DI and interception capabilities are limited in comparison to Spring 1.x capabilities, and Spring 2.0 further raises the bar.This does not change our views, for example, on the EJB 3 interception model, which fails to achieve any of the goals of true AOP and is, in our view, weak and unusable. Interface21 and the Spring project have promised to produce a more detailed FAQ on where they stand on this question