Do you still need EJB when you can do it all with JSF/JSC?

Question

I think EJBs make J2EE unnecessarily complex for 80% of small to mid or even some large scale applications. When you can separate the logic and view using JSF and Servlets, and still do transactions (using JSC DataProviders), why do you still need EJBs? I have heard nightmares with EJBs deployment and how its complex to move them over from test to production servers.
Are EJBs getting obsolete and not worth learning? Afterall, in the Microsoft world, there is nothing like EJB and all they got is ASP.NET (similar to JSF) -- along with its associated data classes and .NEt framework. I am sure they also promote separating logic from presentation.
I think JSF is the best thing Java world has got to compete with Microsoft on developer productivity for small to medium size applications.
Message was edited by:
Sabir

Answer 1

J2EE EJB's are far from being a holy grial capable of solving any situation. They are complex, difficult to learn and code, but we need to be fair and tell the whole story.
EJB's are part of the J2EE technology and offer infrastructure needed in complex applications. I.E., you mention
"When you can separate the logic and view using JSF and Servlets, and still do transactions (using JSC DataProviders)"
but these are only database level transactions. The J2EE app servers can handle global (and distributed) transactions involving different operations over different databases and transactions ruled by non-database software. Just imagine the complexity of handling a "rollback" of this kind. Put that in .NET pipe and try to smoke it.
J2EE EJB Entity Beans were the black sheep of the family. They were oriented to easily handle fine operations (i.e. update a specific record of information) but on the other hand present a poor performance in operations over large sets of data. You can do some optimizations but..... Now the story is a bit different with JavaEE 5 and the Java Persistence API -inspired on Hibernate-.
The bottom line is (as you mention in your post): J2EE/JavaEE are not needed by most of small or mid sized apps. However, I would strongly encourage you to have a look at the JavaEE 5 technology. The fact that portions of the JavaEE technology do not have a counterpart in .NET does not mean that they are not worth to (at least) have a look at them.
Best regards
Antonio