Software is too expensive to build cheaply...

Well, it took long enough, but it's finally done:

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200 OK

Phew. Now maybe I can get those backlogged EJB3-based articles out.

Starting last October, we went through a process of upgrading the main application at Wotif to be running under Java EE 5 (not just Java SE 5). The biggest part of this was upgrading from EJB 2 to EJB 3.

One of the things I noticed was that EJB3 gives you a lot of choices for how to implement and configure EJBs and their associated interfaces. There's a lot of "standards" on how to do it, many of them conflicting, but very little explanation of why. This is the set of standards I came up with (and was largely successful in getting implemented), and why I chose them.

One of the more annoying aspects of testing EJBs has always been the fact you need to bundle them up in a JAR (and often an EAR) and deploy them to a server to thoroughly test them. This process drags out the development of unit tests, and makes life generally painful.

As of EJB 3, however, it's no longer necessary. instead, it is fairly trivial to mock out the container entirely (and safely!)

Back when we were planning the migration to Glassfish, I realised we would have two dependency-injection frameworks in use - EJB 3 and Spring. For obvious reasons, I wanted to know more about how these would interact. At the time (last July), I couldn't find anyone who had used EJB 3 and Spring together - even Ben Alex from Interface21 hadn't come across it. Six months later, and I still haven't heard of anyone using Spring from EJBs. Except for us.