EJB vs. WebService

[Huiming Gu]

From last year, web service become more and more hot. Basically its function overlapped with that of EJB a lot. But it have a lot of advantages than EJB:
1. It is over http, smtp so it can go through firewall. But EJB can not
2. It is lighter than EJB. So it runs faster.
3. It is easier to develope and use than EJB
4. It is based on XML, so it is vender independent. Which means J2EE can communicate with .Net product easily.
Where EJB will sit in the future?

[Thomas Paul]

You are talking apples and oranges. EJBs would be used on the back end after you have already reached the servers. It's not a case of WebServices vs. EJBs but rather WebServices and EJBs.

[Jun Hong]

WebSphere 4.0 supports Web Service. It supports SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI. If Web Service is similar to CORBA, I will say IIOP is SOAP and IDL is WSDL. Behind this WSDL functionalities can be implementd by servlets and EJBs. So to some extent, web service are making ejb and servlet more accessable. You can wrap a EJB behind a web service. Of course you can wrap something else behind web service. I don't see a strong conflict between web service and EJB.