Sun has submitted JSR-318, Enterprise JavaBeans 3.1, to the Java Community Process. According to the JSR,
The purpose of the Enterprise JavaBeans 3.1 specification is to further simplify the EJB architecture by reducing its complexity from the developer's point of view, while also adding new functionality in response to the needs of the community.
The focus will be on the core session bean and message-driven bean component models and their client API. Although the Java Persistence API was developed within EJB 3.0, it will evolve under a separate JSR rather than within EJB 3.1.
Aspects that should be considered by the Expert Group for inclusion in this work include, but are not limited to, the following:
- Removal of the requirement for a separate local business interface.
- Support for direct use of EJBs in the servlet container, including simplified packaging options.
- Singleton beans.
- Support for asynchronous session bean invocation.
- Support for stateful web services via stateful session bean web service endpoints.
- Specification of concurrency options for stateful session beans.
- Application-level callback notifications, including for container initialization and shutdown.
- EJB Timer Service enhancements to support cron-like scheduling, deployment-time timer creation, and stateful session bean timed objects.
- An ejb-jar level component environment to simplify the specification of shared dependencies among components.
Comments are due by July 30.