Ken Saks wrote about a few upcoming features, and I’m liking what I see right now. A few of those - a standardized shutdown/startup API, simpler packaging, simpler async API - I can very much relate to. I still remember having to implement specific application server interfaces simply because there’s no way to have your EJB bean do something on application server startup and shutdown. Then there’s the totally nightmarish packaging when there’s a combination of (EJB) JARs and WARs that shares libraries (do we put them in WEB-INF? Some app server specific lib folder? Where? Argh!). And you’re pretty much screwed if you need to have a singleton like behavior among EJB components.

No doubt, those issues can be worked around, but a spec like EJB is supposed to take care of plumbing stuff like that. Good to see much is still planned after EJB 3.0 has been released.