Failed Technology: Enterprise Java Beans (EJB)

An example of over-engineering.

Non-Medium Members: You can read this article for free on Substack.

Enterprise Java Beans (EJB) was a part of J2EE, there are three types of EJBs:

• Session Beans
  implementation of business tasks, like a service.
• Entity Beans
  bind to a relational database.
• Message-Driven Beans
  receive messages from JMS queue.

Between 2002 and 2004, I worked on EJB projects as a Java Contractor programmer.

Below is a session bean interface:

public interface javax.ejb.SessionBean extends javax.ejb.EnterpriseBean {
   public abstract void ejbActivate(); 
   public abstract void ejbPassivate();
   public abstract void ejbRemove();
   public abstract void setSessionContext(SessionContext ctx);
}

Modern web developers might find the above completely nonsensical. Yet, unfortunately, tens of thousands of Java developers dealt with that on a daily basis in the early 2000s.

EJB is so bad, with multiple acronyms, Martin Fowler came up with a cool acronym “POJO” (Plain Old Java Object) to make using plain Java cool.

Frankly, the memory of EJB I rather forget.

• Takes longer to develop
• Difficult to debug
• Difficult to test
• Making code more complex
  developers…