These two frameworks share a common core design philosophy: they both aim to deliver middleware services to loosely coupled plain old Java objects (POJOs). The framework "wires" application services to the POJOs by intercepting the execution context or injecting service objects to the POJO at runtime. The POJOs themselves are not concerned about the "wiring" and have little dependency upon the framework. As a result, developers can focus on the business logic, and unit test their POJOs without the framework. In addition, since POJOs do not need to inherit from framework classes or implement framework interfaces, the developers have a high degree of flexibility to build inheritance structures and construct applications.

However, while sharing an overall philosophy, the two frameworks use very different approaches to deliver POJO services. While numerous books and articles have been published to compare either Spring or EJB 3.0 to the old EJB 2.1, no serious study has been done to compare Spring to EJB 3.0. In this article, I will examine some key differences behind the Spring and EJB 3.0 frameworks, and discuss their pros and cons.

Author: Michael Juntao Yuan
Published: OnJava, June 29, 2005