Sun Microsystems Inc rounds up the Java hordes at its JavaOne fest this week to once again throw their collective weight behind the Enterprise Java Beans component-based application development model and introduce the overdue 1.0 release of the EJB specification. IBM Corp will demo prototypes of EJB development products including a new cut of its Visual Age Java programming tools extended for EJB. It plans to implement support for EJB across its web, transaction and application servers and claims to have had a lot of influence on the creation of the spec. While Sun will push customers to use its RMI remote method invocation system for connecting EJB applications with other Java application and Object Management Group Corba objects, IBM says it will pursue RMI alongside Corba’s native IIOP distributed communication mechanism. RMI’s also being enabled to work on top of IIOP. EJB works in conjunction with the Java transaction server, a Java implementation of OMG’s object transaction server. Originally crafted by Sun and 19 companies including Novell, IBM, Informix, Sybase, Tandem and Oracle (CI No 3,305), the spec is being driven to market as a kind of de facto industry alternative Microsoft Corp’s Transaction Server model for constructing server-side components in Java. The delay in publishing the final specification will push back availability of compliant implementations until well into the second half of the year. Moreover an essential part of EJB – persistent entity objects – won’t be delivered until version 2.0 of the spec is delivered. WebLogic Inc will be showing off one of the first EJB implementations. Its Tengah Java application server 3.0.1 supports version 0.8 of the EJB spec.

But overdone?

However, not everyone is happy that a group of vendors with proprietary interests are driving the EJB train. More than one ISV we spoke to last week claimed the EJB process is riven with dissent now that it is effectively being steam-rollered ahead by IBM and Oracle. They say Sun, with its antipathy towards OMG’s process, decided – wrongly in their view – to forge its own EJB alliance rather than develop EJB under the auspices of OMG, an action it now may be regretting. EJB work is supposed to show up in a modified, C++ form as OMG’s CorbaBeans component object development framework. Microsoft Corp isn’t supporting EJB and Hewlett-Packard Co will only support it through third parties. The prevailing opinion is that the functionality of the EJB spec was compromised due to the politics in the Java camp.

á