EJB vs Spring

Difference between EJB and Spring

The following article provides EJB vs Spring differences. Let’s see first what EJB and Spring are.

EJB is an acronym for Enterprise Java Beans. EJB is a Java API for server-side architecture for transactional, component-based distributed programming. EJB specifies the bean format and defines a set of services that must be provided by the container on which the bean runs. Thus, a developer needs not be concerned with the service details such as security, transaction support, or any remote object access. To run an EJB application, you need an application server, i.e. EJB container such as JBoss, WebLogic, WebSphere, etc. Java Spring is a lightweight open-source framework that supports various frameworks such as Hibernate, EJB, JSF, Tapestry, etc. Spring framework has a layered structure, and it allows you to choose the required component at the start of the development. Spring framework offers many features such as Inversion of Control (IOC), Aspect-Oriented (AOP), Transaction Management, JDBC Exception Handling, etc. That allows the developer to concentrate on the business requirement rather than the architectural details of the application.

Head to Head Comparison between EJB and Spring

Below are the top 10 differences between EJB vs Spring.

Key Differences between EJB and Spring.

Let us discuss some of the major differences between EJB vs Spring.

• EJB vs Spring’s main difference is that EJB is a specification of Java EE, whereas Spring is a framework or an implementation.
• EJB is an architecture for transactional, component-based programming. It makes server-side development much easier for the Java developer. Spring framework is a Java platform that provides support for developing the Java application. The framework handles the infrastructure configuration and lets the developer focus on business requirements.

EJB Architecture

• The EJB framework separates the business logic from the low-level details so that the developer can concentrate on the business requirement. Unlike legacy systems that use many SQL queries, EJB architecture does not use the SQL queries directly; instead, it uses a model-view-controller design pattern where queries are wrapped inside the EJB container that data can be assessed through EJB’s.
• At the center of the application, an EJB container manages a set of enterprise beans. This bean is responsible for managing the connection with the backend database systems, typically a relational database. As you know, in the Spring framework, this is taken care of by the Data Access or the Integration module.
• In EJB, the web container uses JSP to access the EJB beans; it transforms the JSP to HTML and then serves the HTML to the browser. In Spring, this is being handled by the Web module.
• In EJB, the middle tier, i.e. the enterprise beans, act as a wrapper over various systems such as the relational database. There are two types of enterprise beans, i.e. entity and session beans. On a high level, session beans represent activity and entity bean represents entities of the application. An entity bean is a persistent object stored in a storage system such as a database. On the contrary, Spring, the framework, uses a web container for session management.

Spring Architecture

• Spring framework has about 20 modules and offers various features. These modules are logically grouped into Data Access/ Integration, Web, AOP, Aspects, Instrumentation, Core container, and test.
• The core container consists of the core, beans, context, and the Expression language modules. The core and Bean modules provide features such as IoC and Dependency Injection.
• The Data Access/ Integration layer provides transaction modules like JDBC, JMS, ORM, OXM, etc. The JDBC module provides a JDBC abstraction layer that removes the need to code the configuration code required to establish a connection with a database.
• The ORM module supports some popular object-relational mapping API like JPA, Hibernate. Unlike EJB, which only supports JPA.
• The web layer consists of Web-Struts, Web-Servlet and Web-Portlet modules. The web-servlet module contains Spring’s MVC implementation for web applications. It provides a clean separation between the web forms and the business logic layer.
• Spring AOP modules provide an AOP Alliance-compliant aspect-oriented programming that lets you define method interceptors to decouple functionality cleanly.
• The test module provides support of JUnit or TestNG.

EJB vs Spring Comparison Table

Let us discuss the topmost differences between EJB vs Spring.

Basis of comparison	EJB	Spring
Transaction Management	EJB supports only the JTA transaction manager.	Through its PlatformTransactionManager interface, spring supports multiple transactions such as JTA, Hibernate, JDO, and JDBC. Uses JTA transaction manager to support distributed transaction
Dependency Injection	It can inject EJB’s data, JMS resources, JPA resources into the container.	Lists, properties, map and JNDI resources can be injected.
Persistence	It supports programmatic bean-managed persistence and tightly coupled to JPA.	It provides a framework that supports the integration of various persistence technologies like JDBC, Hibernate, JDO, and iBATIS.
State Management	Supports stateful session beans and extended persistence context.	Supports Web container session management
Web Services	Supports stateful session beans and extended persistence context.	It does not support any direct web service integration.
Security	It supports both declarative and programmatic security support through JAAS. Supports declarative security through Users and roles. Declarative security is configured in the deployment descriptor file.	No out of box security implementation. However, it provides declarative security through the spring configuration file or class metadata. Acegi is an open-source security framework built on top of Spring.
Distributed Computing	Provides container-managed remote method calls.	It provides support for remote calls via RMI, JAX-RPC and web services.
Messaging	It supported out of the box messaging. Capabilities through Message Driven Beans.	For the message, the listener’s configuration needs to be added.
Scheduling	Provides simple scheduling through EJB Timer service	For scheduling, need to add and configure Quartz.
AOP	It provides limited support through interceptors.	Support the AspectJ and Spring AOP alliance

Conclusion

Every technology has some advantages and disadvantages, and before choosing any specification or framework, it is essential to understand the pros and cons upfront. In this article, we have seen that EJB is a specification of J2EE, whereas Spring is a framework for easy implementation, even though there are some areas that do overlap. We have seen the differences in the architecture and discussed some of the EJB and spring offers to the developer.

With the difference matrix, we can conclude this is if you want to use advanced features like AOP and want more control over the application, then go with the Spring framework. If you do not want to go deep into the database’s configuration details and the application is very stateful, then go with EJB.

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This has been a guide to EJB vs Spring. Here we also discuss the key differences with infographics and comparison table. You can also go through our other suggested articles to learn more –

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