Migration of Legacy Application : EJB3 or Spring

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I have legacy application using struts & ejb2.0, hibernate v3.0 running on JBoss v4.0 and now we have do migration of that application to new technology stack. We are exploring pros and cons of different technology stack and right now we have two options to decide from: EJB3.0 & JSF, Hibernate v4 on Jboss 7 or Spring & Hibernate v4 on tomcat.

What parameters should I be considering to select one or the other or vice-versa?

Update:

Which of EJB3.0 and Spring has efficient community support, side note - ejb3.0 tag has 1097 questions and spring has 13297, and so some how am getting inclined towards Spring, also by not being an standard spring has an advantage of rapid upgrade's which would fix industry challenges pretty fast compared to ejb3.

Thoughts?

Franconia answered 13/2, 2012 at 15:36 Comment(2)

is this loaded question or some more clarifications is needed for this question? – Franconia 13/2, 2012 at 15:44

@DaveNewton: I have changed my question and I agree with you on Better: No way to answer but what parameters should i be considering over selecting one or the other or vice-versa. – Franconia 13/2, 2012 at 16:5

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A long time ago, Spring was the de-facto thing to use, but over time Spring grew into quite a heavyweight beast. EJB on the other hand massively slimmed down and was greatly simplified.

The same goes for JSF, which was hugely improved in 2.0.

Those technologies really shine when used together in the Java EE 6 stack, which is currently having a great momentum. A complete Java EE 6 implementation (e.g. GlassFish) is only some 50MB, and the smaller subset of it (called Web profile) can be half of that. Servers start up in mere seconds.

At the moment I really don't see any specific need for Spring anymore. If your stack is already on Spring, it's of course not required to migrate to Java EE, but for new projects I would never choose Spring these days.

Slumberland answered 13/2, 2012 at 16:47 Comment(5)

currently am using ejb2.0 and so from your post it appears that ejb3.0 would be better option, right? – Franconia 13/2, 2012 at 17:27

Indeed, EJB3 is infinitely better. In fact, it's so much better they should maybe have renamed it entirely. EJB2 is really rather crappy, and almost an insult against developers. – Slumberland 17/2, 2012 at 16:46

But are there enough community support available outside for EJB3.0 as compared to Spring? – Franconia 17/2, 2012 at 19:21

Yes, there is. Concerning the whole EE stack, there's great support right here at SO, but the JBoss forums are great too. Most of the EE sub-parts have their own public JIRA where you can easily post bugs or ask for enhancements. There are lots of blogs on Java EE topics, where you can learn a lot from and there are plenty of books as well. – Slumberland 20/2, 2012 at 11:29

We're facing a similar issue with our company now. There are several legacy apps written with Struts1/Spring2/Hibernate3 and most developers are simply fed up with the high maintenance of XML files and JSP views. Would anyone be able to point to an outline of what could be done to migrate these apps? None of the teams have enough authority to say "let's stop all maintenance of the legacy code while we migrate it all to a new shiny platform". So we are looking at alternatives to how a migration can be made without disrupting code maintenance in the old repository. – Nordin 26/6, 2013 at 16:53

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Past year i had the same doubt, i choosed the EJB3 and i do not regret , here a good article to consider: http://biese.wordpress.com/2008/02/03/another-thought-of-spring-vs-ejb3/

Amuse answered 13/2, 2012 at 15:59 Comment(0)

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A long time ago, Spring was the de-facto thing to use, but over time Spring grew into quite a heavyweight beast. EJB on the other hand massively slimmed down and was greatly simplified.

The same goes for JSF, which was hugely improved in 2.0.

Those technologies really shine when used together in the Java EE 6 stack, which is currently having a great momentum. A complete Java EE 6 implementation (e.g. GlassFish) is only some 50MB, and the smaller subset of it (called Web profile) can be half of that. Servers start up in mere seconds.

At the moment I really don't see any specific need for Spring anymore. If your stack is already on Spring, it's of course not required to migrate to Java EE, but for new projects I would never choose Spring these days.

Slumberland answered 13/2, 2012 at 16:47 Comment(5)

currently am using ejb2.0 and so from your post it appears that ejb3.0 would be better option, right? – Franconia 13/2, 2012 at 17:27

Indeed, EJB3 is infinitely better. In fact, it's so much better they should maybe have renamed it entirely. EJB2 is really rather crappy, and almost an insult against developers. – Slumberland 17/2, 2012 at 16:46

But are there enough community support available outside for EJB3.0 as compared to Spring? – Franconia 17/2, 2012 at 19:21

Yes, there is. Concerning the whole EE stack, there's great support right here at SO, but the JBoss forums are great too. Most of the EE sub-parts have their own public JIRA where you can easily post bugs or ask for enhancements. There are lots of blogs on Java EE topics, where you can learn a lot from and there are plenty of books as well. – Slumberland 20/2, 2012 at 11:29

We're facing a similar issue with our company now. There are several legacy apps written with Struts1/Spring2/Hibernate3 and most developers are simply fed up with the high maintenance of XML files and JSP views. Would anyone be able to point to an outline of what could be done to migrate these apps? None of the teams have enough authority to say "let's stop all maintenance of the legacy code while we migrate it all to a new shiny platform". So we are looking at alternatives to how a migration can be made without disrupting code maintenance in the old repository. – Nordin 26/6, 2013 at 16:53

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