Web Forefront

Both EJB 3 and WCF place great emphasis on creating web services from plain business classes -- POJO's as they are readily referred to in the Java World -- and complementing them with meta-data -- attributes as they are known in .NET -- instead of working with specialized API's or inheritance hierarchies. This not only eases the creation of web services, but also brings benefits to other developments issues ranging from Testing to Re-factoring/Maintenance.

The meta-data used in both WCF and EJB is used for "wiring" everything from transactional behaviour to the WSDL contracts that will be used by service clients. This interpretation is achieved by a run time engine, which takes care of translating all meta-data into system code or routines that save development time. In the case of .NET this is WCF run-time, and for Java this would be an application server supporting EJB 3.

Here is a very brief code listing showing both models

[ServiceContract]
public class Calculator
{
   [OperationContract]
   public double Add(double a, double b) { // Business logic };  
   [OperationContract]
   private double Subtract(double a, double b) { // Business logic };
}

@Stateless
@WebService(serviceName="Calculator")
public class CalculatorBean  {

   @WebMethod
   public double Add(double a, double b) {    // Business logic }

   @WebMethod
   private double Subtract(double a, double b) { // Business logic }

}

Although the previous examples are as simplistic as they can get, it shows the implementing web services patterns used by these two major platforms are very much alike.