EJB 3, Spring, Hibernate Comparison Talk at Connecticut JUG

On the 8th I had my EJB 3, Spring, Hibernate comparison talk at the Connecticut JUG. I didn't realize exactly how big this JUG was. There was a very large turnout and good audience participation. The JUG leader Ryan Cuprak posted a very nice review for the presentation on the JUG site. It is always good to hear when people receive one's efforts well.

I think the crowd was heavy on the EJB 2.x side because of all the larger insurance companies in and around Hartford. There were actually a number of people using Entity Beans who were particularly happy about the new features introduced in JPA. Ryan asked me to return in a few months for a JPA/Hibernate 3 specific talk. In the meanwhile, I'm trying to get Ryan in touch with a few of the Spring/Interface21 folks. Apparently, they have not had a intro Spring talk yet, although some JUG members are using Spring in production environments.

The same concern over WebSphere EJB 3 support came up again. I really hope IBM has gotten it's efforts in gear. Someone also asked about the better annotation support for DI in Spring 2.1. I couldn't really tell them much. I've read some vague things here and there and am anxious to see the concrete road map for 2.1. The gradual gravitation towards annotations is definitely encouraging. I still suspect Spring will remain a highly configurable DI/AOP container at heart instead of an EJB-like platform with a lot of high-level constructs. In either case, I've always found mucking around in verbose, messy XML a pain, so Spring annotation support has to come as a pleasant development for a lot of folks.