Developer Revisits EJB After Years on Spring Boot, Finds a Transformed Spec

A software developer recently built a clinic-appointment backend using Jakarta EE and EJB on WildFly, revisiting a technology they had abandoned years earlier due to its notorious complexity. EJB 2.x, prevalent in the early 2000s, required developers to maintain multiple interface files, XML deployment descriptors, and vendor-specific configuration just to implement basic business logic. The frustration drove many developers, including the author, toward Spring Framework, which offered annotation-based dependency injection and far less boilerplate. EJB 3.0, released in 2006, marked a significant overhaul — replacing verbose XML configuration with simple annotations like @Stateless and introducing JPA as a cleaner alternative to the problematic Container-Managed Persistence model. Returning to the spec years later, the developer set out to determine whether modern Jakarta EE had genuinely closed the gap with Spring Boot and Quarkus.