Based on the recent public draft release of the EJB 3.1 specification, Ken Saks provides the main changes for this release:

* The "no interface" Local view (3.4.4 , 4.9.8) * Portable global JNDI names (4.4) * Asynchronous session bean invocations (4.5) * Singleton session beans (4.8) * Startup / Shutdown callbacks (4.8.1, 4.8.2) * Calendar-based timer expressions (18.2.1) * Automatic timer creation (18.2.2) * Non-persistent Timers (18.2.3) * Deployment of EJB components directly in a .war without an ejb-jar (20.4) * EJB "Lite" -- a standard lightweight subset of the EJB API (21.1) * Embeddable EJB -- an API for executing EJB components within Java SE (Ch. 22)

Read Ken's original post on 'Guide to the EJB 3.1 Public Draft' http://blogs.sun.com/kensaks/entry/guide_to_the_ejb_3