Eclipse WebTools project

Eclipse have a ‘WebTools’ project underway on their site, to develop and add tools to support JSP, Struts, and other J2EE technology (EJBs, Web Services) within the Eclipse environment.

Depending on the quality and success of these plugins, I wonder if IBM’s Websphere Studio Application Developer (built on Eclipse and already offering these features) will take a hit when a similar toolset for Eclipse becomes available for free (of course you won’t get the integrated test Websphere server that you do with WSAD, which if you are targeting that platform is its major plus point)

Gavin King’s comments on EJB3.0

Gavin has a good article on EJB3.0 in his blog and also on TheServerSide.com.

He makes an interesting suggestion that the new lightweight programming model of EJB3.0 with it’s annotations might make make the use of session beans a more suitable replacement for the current use of HttpSession in the web tier. There has been a trend over thae last couple of years to not use Stateful session beans, in favour of using Stateless instead. App server vendors have been saying for quite some time though that the perceived overhead of using Stateful beans is just not founded on any real fact (anymore?).

EJB3.0 is going to change EJB development considerably – this is the spec that EJB1.0 should have been….