There are two central component models we use today: Spring POJOs and EJBs. With JSR-299 everything is a bean now. But, where’s the innovation? The JCP continues in conservation of what became a standard a decade ago.
A week ago Rod compared Red Hat/JBoss and SpringSource. In the Open Source world that’s indeed a comparison between the component models EJB vs. Spring POJOs.
It is pretty clear for years now that even with EJB 3 the idea of a container which delivers everything to fulfill every non-functional requirement is a dead end. The ideas from a decade ago don’t work anymore. Maybe they never really worked, but nobody recognized it in those days. Thanks to Rod we have a good alternative today.
Most interesting with Rod’s blog post was a comment about JSR-299. Rod was asked what SpringSource will do to support “Web Beans”, what now is called “Java Contexts and Dependency Injection”. Nice. It’s official now, Spring is in standardization by the JCP.
Well, not really. JSR-299 takes all the old JCP standards of the last decade and tries to combine these with what Spring delivers for years. EJB is central part of all thoughts. No wonder with a JBoss guy as lead 
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If you study the spec you recognize that we will get an EJB-lite container, but it is still an EJB container. Compare this to what SpringSource is doing with the Tomcat architecture today.
So, what is it all about? JSR-299 looks like an extension to EJB 3. So, it will help to get all the old stuff into a modern architecture concept. But, I expect that is will be cheaper to re-implement all the legacy stuff using Spring in the center and skip all the old and new EJB stuff around it.
BTW: The JSR-299 code examples show how horrible the code looks like if you have to use annotations excessively. But, the XML configuration doesn’t look smarter to me either.
I'm Rainer Eschen, an IT-Business Architect, who looks back on more than 20 years of programming experience. Since 1994 I'm an IT professional with a focus on consulting and architecture. I have also been part of "the source" for three years, working as Sun Sales Support Engineer and Sun Java Center Architect at Sun Microsystems, Germany.