There is an interesting statement about technologies dedicated to a given profile in the J2EE 6 spec. You may have noticed the descriptions of something called EJB 3.1 (lite).

"EJB 3.1 (Lite)" refers to the idea of allowing implementations to deliver a subset of EJB 3.1. The contents of this "lite" subset are wholly undecided at this point, but as an example it might include the annotation-based programming model introduced in EJB 3.0, restricted to session beans with local interfaces (only). In other words, you could write an annotated session bean with a local interface and use it in your Web Profile-compliant product (assuming (B) is accepted, that is). But, for example, you could not write a EJB 2.1-style session bean, or an EJB 3.0 message-driven bean, or a EJB 3.0 stateful session bean with a remote interface.

It seems that someone is obsessed with EJB. I don't see any advantage of EJB 3.1 (Lite) over POJO except complications that affect everyone.

• deployment and packaging - WAR vs EJB JAR, classloader isolation etc.
• need for an application server - forget about Tomcat or Jetty
• complexity overhead - you still need a lot of about EJB as a bean lifecycle, transaction, JNDI etc.

From a developer's point of view there isn't much difference between EJB full and EJB lite. Both of them bring the same level of complexity and make development more complicated. I don't think that EJB 3.1 could be useful for developers.

So, who really needs this EJB 3.1 lite?