The Apache OpenEJB community has released OpenEJB 3.1. OpenEJB is an embeddable, lightweight EJB 3.0 implementation with partial support of EJB 3.1 that can be used not only as a standalone server, but as an embedded server in Tomcat, JUnit, Eclipse, Intellij, Maven, Ant, or any other IDE or application. In addition to the features you'd expect in an EJB 3.0 implementation, OpenEJB emphasizes ease-of-use, painless configuration, and powerful testing possibilities so you can focus on product development This release contains significant enhancements, improvements, new functionality and allows developers to get early access to some key parts of EJB 3.1. In addition to the embeddable EJB container and Collapsed EAR (ejbs in .war files) functionality which have been long standing OpenEJB features, now slated for EJB 3.1, this release contains full support for the new EJB 3.1 Singleton Session bean type. The Singleton API adds some critical new functionality to EJB such as application startup/shutdown hooks and multi-threaded capabilities. Much of what Stateless beans are used for now can be replaced by a multi-threaded Singleton. EJB 3.1 features and EJB enhancements:

• Singleton Session Beans
• Constructor Injection
• Spring Integration

Tomcat features:

• Injection Support for JSF 1.2 ManagedBeans

Embedded features:

• EAR-style aggregation of modules discovered in the classpath
• ConnectorModule discoverable via the classpath (rar files)
• PersistenceModule discoverable via the classpath
• Improved JavaAgent/JPA enhancement for Unit Tests
• Improved detection of testing and embedded scenarios
• Improved classpath configuration searching
• Property overriding for logging configuration
• Property overriding for persistence.xml properties
• VM-scoped Security for embedded scenarios
• LocalInitialContext.close() to logout of embedded container
• LocalInitialContext.close() to shutdown embedded container
• JMS runs port-free in embedded mode
• Automatically set eclipselink.target-server for EclipseLink
• Automatically set toplink.target-server for TopLink
• Automatically set hibernate.transaction.manager_lookup_class for Hibernate
• Optimized annotation scanner to determine if a jar is an ejb jar more quickly

Standalone features:

• Severely improved client performance over ejbd
• Client Connection Failover and Request Retry
• Client-side Connection Pool
• Client connection KeepAlive
• Graceful shutdown of client/server connections
• Multicast discovery and grouping
• EJBd protocol over SSL
• JDBC/DataSource based login module

It's incredible that something as basic as this was left out of the base specification and only available as a vendor provided extension as in the case of the Jboss/Hibernate @IndexColumn. When using the basic EJB specification I just love having to simulate that kind of semantic by adding an extra index property to my Entity model. This reminds me of when (back in EJB2) the specification didn't even provide support for auto incrementing primary keys.

Thanks David and openejb team, you made working with EJB fun again, simple and easy to configure container that you can embed any where, specially Tomcat. My Kudos to you. RJ.

Why would I use "Apache OpenEJB.3X" ? Other than the reason "I can use OpenEJB with Tomcat & it do not need EJB container."

You could use OpenEJB, if you allready have basic applications using Servlet/JSP (and running well on a basic Tomcat) and if you need to add JPA/JTA for example. OpenEJB is simple to embed in an existing Tomcat configuration, and many times you don't want/can switch to a full J2EE container. Good works and thanks to the OpenEJB team

Why would I use "Apache OpenEJB.3X" ? Other than the reason "I can use OpenEJB with Tomcat & it do not need EJB container."

Embedding EJB in Tomcat. A weird idea. Multiplies complexity by combining two already complex technologies. In that sense, it's a typical Java (Web-)framework.

Congrats David ;-)

David, Congratulations OpenEJB team and simply outstanding work. It's great to see there is already a first-class implementation out there that supports some EJB 3.1 features. I look forward to seeing some of the other key ones like the cron scheduling annotations and asynchronous processing. I hope the other containers take note of your work :-). Cheers, Reza

I'm looking forward to a review comparing OpenEJB 3.1 vs Glassfish v3.