At TSSS, the EJB3 spec lead Linda de Michiel presented what EJB3 is going to look like. I'm sure you have read all the fuss about it already.

The nice thing about EJB3 is that the spec committee is trying to address the limitations of the EJB2 component model. The EJB3 component model is based on the following concepts and goals:

1) POJOs/POJIs (plain old java objects/interfaces - nothing to extend)
2) Dependency Injection (setter flavour)
3) Testability outside the container
4) Annotations
5) CMP becomes Hibernate

Linda mentioned 24 times during her presentation that Gavin and Hibernate had been an important source of inspiration for the EJB3 persistence model (it's true, Marcf was counting and nearly creamed his pants). That's great though. Gavin and Hibernate rock.

Those of you who are a little bit uptodate in Java OSS land may have recognised that the 3 first points have been popularised by three lightweight containers, namely Spring, Hivemind and PicoContainer.

Linda was talking about as much about POJO/DI/Testability as she was about persistence, so when she didn't mention once where the rest of the spec (the non-persistence related stuff) was inspired from, it struck me as rather strange.

Here are my speculations about why:

a) The EJB3 spec committee have invented these concepts independently and have not been inspired by the current lightweight containers.
b) Other projects only get mentioned if one of its contributors are on the spec committee.
c) The EJB3 spec committee is trying to hide the fact that they were inspired from other projects and sell it as their own invention.

Cedric utters his enthusiasm about the new spec. And expresses how sick he is of lightweight containers.

Well done folks!