I'm planning a project that I think will benefit from distributed components. I started learning J2EE in anticipation developoment. The benefits of using enterprise javabeans looks like just what I need.

The question is whether I should look at EJB 2.1 or 3.0. Version 2.1 seems to be very complicated, and I am having diffulty understanding how to glue everything together. Version 3.0 claims to be much simpler but I don't know if it is mature enough to use in a production application.

The second question is which server to use if I go with 3.0. According to my research the prominent players are currently JBoss and Glassfish. Or are there others? I prefer open source solutions. I need something I can learn to use now, begin development in a couple of weeks, and be mature enough for production in six months.

Opposing opinions are welcome as long as they are not on fire.

JBoss is definitely the route to go. The JBoss page for ejb 3.0 is:

http://www.jboss.org/products/ejb3

There are plenty of others but I think JBoss is considered the cream of the crop, especially of the Open Source solutions. For you it would probably be wise to begin with 3.0 so you arenot migrating later.

Thanks for the reply. I installed JBoss yesterday. I also installed Eclipse and the JBoss IDE for Eclipse, and spent about 3 hours on the tutorial. I think I like Netbeans better if I can figure out how to integrate it with JBoss.

No problem, of all the Java IDEs, I prefer Netbeans. JBuilder is horrible rubbish that ... well let's not go down that road. =) Check out this article for Netbeans + JBoss :

http://www.netbeans.org/kb/50/jboss-...g-started.html

You may want to consider installing GlassFish as an application server with Netbeans.

Thanks for the replies. I am now happily using NetBeans with JBoss. I am still using ee 2.1 because I want it on my resume. I still have to do manual entries to the container specific configs until I figure out how to generate stuff automatically. I guess I needed to know how to do all that stuff anyway.

It turned out that the biggest learning issue was all of the conf files and such. As soon as I thought I had cleared one obstacle, another one would pop up which took several hours to figure out. Most of the tutorials seem to be very silent on an configuration different than the one the examples use, so I had to dig out docs from all over the place and get a piece at a time and try things until I understood them or got them to work accidentally.