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October 2008

 The user base has grown significantly.
The primary areas seem to be people replacing the JBoss Embedded platform with OpenEJB as an embedded container for either testing or Swing/GUI work and people using OpenEJB in Tomcat for web work.
There have also been some reports of very large applications getting ported to OpenEJB.
External signs of adoption have increased as well with some OpenEJB users popping up in other communities such as Maven asking for OpenEJB focused improvements in their tools, a half dozen or so very favorable blog entries from people outside the project and a recent thread on TheServerSide where many users expressed they were considering leaving Spring for OpenEJB/Tomcat or Glassfish.

Development on the OpenEJB Eclipse Plugin continues strong. The still-in-development Eclipse plugin is attracting some interest and has already received some contributions from at least two different individuals. Thanks goes out to Jonathan Gallimore for not succumbing to post-commit-status burnout as so many people do when first getting commit. The dedication is noted. Other larger areas of development have been a total overhaul of the client/server aspect of OpenEJB, first in the request speed and throughput and secondly in request failover and retry. This had been a weak area for the project and these improvements will likely increase the number of people using the standalone version of OpenEJB (current major areas of use are embedded and Tomcat). Some experimental work on integrating OpenEJB with Spring has been done which when completed should prove to be a compelling feature.

Support for EJB 3.1 is underway. Full support for the proposed Singleton bean type has been added, which to our knowledge is the only implementation in the market currently. This should drive some EJB 3.1 early adopters to the project and serve as a good tool for getting feedback for the EJB 3.1 spec.

The OpenEJB 3.1 release is up for a vote and if all goes well will be final in a few days. It’s been a bit too long since our last release in April. Hopefully after 3.1 is released we can get back into the frequent release rhythm we had throughout the betas and up until 3.0 final.