Tom is feeling Disillusioned with J2EE. Although it seems to be more of a disillusionment with EJB than anything else.

The good news is that it doesn’t have to be that way. He asks if people have been doing J2EE without EJB, and the answer (for me at least) is “yes”.

On my current project, and the one before, I have managed to win the fight against excessive EJB use. On my last project we used a basic templated SQL framework for persistence, without any use of EJBs at all (there were some decision makers concerned about the performance of OR mapping tools, which led to the decision of using the SQL templates).

On my current project we are using the OFBiz Entity Engine, which works well (wish they would decouple it from the rest of OFBiz a bit more ).

It has a single Stateless Session EJB that splits the application into web (Servlet) and Application (does db access, and has object caches) tiers.

On both projects external consultants suggested using a full blown EJB approach for reasons that didn’t really stand up to questioning, but a lightweight approach won in the end.

I am also writing a Struts/Hibernate/JDBC app on my own which fits the bill of a J2EE non-EJB app.

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