Rapid Adoption Followed By Criticism
The vision was persuasively presented by EJB advocates such as IBM and Sun Microsystems, and Enterprise JavaBeans were quickly adopted by large companies. Problems were quick to appear with initial versions. Some developers felt that the APIs of the EJB standard were far more complex than those developers were used to. An abundance of checked exceptions, required interfaces, and the implementation of the bean class as an abstract class were unusual and counter-intuitive for programmers. The problems that the EJB standard was attempting to address, such as object-relational mapping and transactional integrity, were complex, however many programmers found the APIs to be just as difficult, leading to a perception that EJBs introduced complexity without delivering real benefits.
In addition, businesses found that using EJBs to encapsulate business logic brought a performance penalty. This is because the original specification only allowed for remote method invocation through CORBA (and optionally other protocols), even though the large majority of business applications actually do not require this distributed computing functionality. The EJB 2.0 specification addressed this concern by adding the concept of local interfaces which could be called directly without performance penalties by applications that were not distributed over multiple servers.
The complexity issue continued to hinder EJB's acceptance. Although developer tools made it easy to create and use EJBs by automating most of the repetitive tasks, these tools did not make it any easier to learn how to use the technology. Moreover, a counter-movement had grown up on the grass-roots level among programmers. The main products of this movement were the so-called 'lightweight' (i.e. in comparison to EJB) technologies of Hibernate (for persistence and object-relational mapping) and the Spring Framework (which provided an alternate and far less verbose way to encode business logic). Despite lacking the support of big businesses, these technologies grew in popularity and were adopted by businesses.
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