O'Reilly Network: The Death of EJB As We Know It? [August 30, 2002] "People are starting to recognize some of the frailty implicit in the EJB specification. In particular, the emphasis on vendor-neutrality within the EJB specification leads to a number of inefficient ways of developing enterprise applications. In order to work around these inefficiencies, developers are forced to adopt "design patterns" that create more work for the average developer, arguably more work than if they'd just abandoned EJB altogether and started from a core architecture of just servlets/JSP and JDBC. ... Developers seek simpler alternatives to EJB for a simple reason: EJB is not only way overkill for most enterprise applications, but it also represents a huge learning curve for the average Java developer. The goal of "making enterprise applications easier" for developers (a stated aim of the EJB Specification) has been sacrificed on the altar of vendor-neutrality."