I agree quite a lot with Andrew. In fact, I agree enough that I stopped using EJBs around the middle of last year because they are SUCH a pain to build and maintain, and because the performance sucks and there's nothing you can do about it, even if you pay the high premiums for "advanced" application servers.
So, since there aren't really many alternatives I decided to make one as part of my open source project Open For Business (www.ofbiz.org or sf.net/projects/ofbiz). It's called the Entity Engine. The main idea behind it is: have an XML file that describes you data layout, and then handle generic persistence functionality through a single class. The GenericValue object works just like a value object in the EJB design patterns context but is Generic so you don't have to create one for every database table or combination of tables. It also handles "View Entities" to combine tables and a few other nice features such as JTA transaction support. The upside of it (which I was chasing) is that it is easy to change the data structure and have it update the database and the run-time data layout enforcement as well as immediately making new columns and such immediately available in the GenericValue objects. So, when you want to change something in the data layout, wham, it's done and you can move on to your application functionality. I don't know if it will ever become a standard and replace EJBs, but talk about this kind of tool has been going around for a while, and here is one implementation of those ideas that is being used in commercial deployments and is available open source. Even if it doesn't replace EJBs for everyone, it certainly has for me, and has saved me hundreds of hours and hundreds of thousands of lines of generated EJB code (no, I haven't written it by hand in a while, way too much work for stupid persistence code). Later, -David Jones -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
