Excited About EJB 3.1 & JSF 2.0?

To most enterprise Java developers J2EE meant Servlets, JSP and EJB and JavaEE was later equated with JSF and EJB 3. However with Spring and various other frameworks and toolkits being ever so popular in the past few years, both EJB and JSF have lost a lot of ground. The new and improved version of both these specifications (EJB 3.1 & JSF 2.0) will be part of Java EE 6 that’s expected to be released in a few months. Will these new specifications lead to a revival of JSF and EJB?

The JSF 2.0 JSR says that it will bring the best ideas in web application development to the Java EE platform.
The Expert Group will be harvesting existing ideas that:

1) Maximize the productivity of the web application development experience, for graphical IDE and command-line developers.
2) Minimize the complexity of maintenance of the web application during its production lifetime.
3) Make it easy to create responsive user interfaces through effective use of Ajax techniques. This includes enabling applications that have nearly all of the MVC controller UI logic and intra-page component interaction into the client, while keeping a sensible level of application logic on the server. Ideas that allow for graceful degredation when JavaScript is diabled or unavailable are also important.
4) Make it possible to expand the reach of your web application by continuing to support fully functional server based web applications that do not use JavaScript in the client.
5) Leverage modularity to expand integration opportunities between the JSF framework and other client and server side web application technologies. This would make it easier for a developer to use individual parts of JSF without being forced to use all of it. For example, the request processing lifecycle is useful even without the JSF View being present. As another example, JSF has a robust I18N and L10N capability. It should be possible to use this capability without using JSF components for your UI. A short way to characterize this is, “be mashup friendly”.
6) Make it easy to expose your data by leveraging the Java Persistence API

The EJB 3.1 JSR says that the purpose of the Enterprise JavaBeans 3.1 specification is to further simplify the EJB architecture by reducing its complexity from the developer’s point of view, while also adding new functionality in response to the needs of the community.
The focus will be on the core session bean and message-driven bean component models and their client API. Although the Java Persistence API was developed within EJB 3.0, it will evolve under a separate JSR rather than within EJB 3.1.