I'm mostly interested in EJB Lite, as I think the simplicity of what EJB Lite + JPA brings to the web app/web services world is sorely missing. EJB Lite hits the sweet spot IMHO.
Outside of that I like both the Singleton Beans and new Timer services. And I'm hoping for some better lifecycle management and clarification, specifically regarding "application" startup.
My issue there is that the only "safe" place to put one time startup code, portably, is in a Servlet listener, but even then you have a race condition with, for example, pre-existing timer tasks.
I'd love an entry point when the JNDI is all set up, but before anything else starts executing to get some once only work done.
I don't know if EJB 3.1 is addressing that or not.
Also looking forward to GFv3 to lower overall server footprint.
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