title: Session Beans and EJB3 vs Spring
body: <p>I was curious about the capabilities of Sessions Beans in EJB 3 and whether they can be replaced in a typical mid-scale enterprise application with Spring. </p>
  
  <p>I found this article:
  <a href="http://drag0sd0g.blogspot.com/2010/01/session-bean-alternative-spring.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://drag0sd0g.blogspot.com/2010/01/session-bean-alternative-spring.html</a>
  that states the following: <em>"Because of heavy use of annotations,
  you can pretty much avoid “XML Hell” using EJB 3; the same cannot be said of Spring.
  Moreover, because it is an integral part of the Java EE standard, the EJB container
  is natively integrated with components such as JSF, JSP, servlets, the JTA transaction
  manager, JMS providers, and JAAS security providers of your application server. <strong>With Spring, you have to worry whether your application server fully supports the framework with these native components and other high-performance features like clustering, load balancing, and failover. If you aren’t worried about such things, then Spring is not a bad choice at all"</em></strong></p>
  
  <p>Do you agree with this statement? The Stateless Sessions Beans used to be considered a very powerful enterprise technology because of the pooling and management capabilities. My question is: when is it really necessary to use EJB 3 instead of or in addition to Spring (assuming a mission critical enterprise application in a large company)?</p>