Need for EJB always

Question

Do I always have to go in for writing EJBs to develop a n enterprise business applications?

Answer 1

There are certain advantages for using an EJB in an application. To list a few:
1. Container-based transaction handling.
2. Component-security.
3. Persistence (this can be achieved even without EJBs using a persistence framework like Hibernate)
4. Scalability
5. Encapsulation of business loogic to provide integration with other components.
If the application is a small one, there would mostly not be much use of these features. This is mostly due to the fact that these advantages would be outweighed by the performance due to presence of EJBs. A non-EJB solution would provide a better performance in most of the situations.
You could download Mastering EJB by Ed Roman here
http://www.theserverside.com/books/wiley/masteringEJB/The Chapter 11 provides the best practices on EJBs and gives a good discussion on when to use EJBs and when to opt out of them. :)