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Special thanks to Piero Sartini who came up with this alternative. It is basically the same as the previous alternative, but it uses the new JEE6 Context and Dependency Injection (CDI) and session scoped beans instead of EJBs. This alternative should have better performance than using EJBs. Instead of annotating the Vaadin application as a stateful session bean, it should be annotated using the @SessionScoped annotation, like so:

"Stop using Tomcat and wondering why JEE "doesn't work." You're doing yourself a big disservice. Start thinking about JBoss AS 6, or GlassFish v3 - Yes, I know, it's a "Full JEE Container," - it's "Heavy," but with JEE6, that's not a bad thing: It all "Just works" and it works really well. Trust me, the reason people have thought Java EE sucks, is because they try to do this stuff on Tomcat, and say "Why doesn't (JPA, JMS, JTA, EJB, JSF, CDI) work?" Well… that's because Tomcat only gives you Servlet - the Request/Response lifecycle. So people install all these things manually, or try to, and then say, "Wow, Java EE is really hard to use, shit, I'm gonna use Spring or Grails instead.""

Does it all make sense now? Do you know how to solve every problem? Probably not, but when it comes right down to it, using Java EE can be even simpler than using Spring, and take much less time. You just have to find the right guides and the right documentation (which is admittedly a severe sore-spot of Java EE; the documentation is still a work in progress, but is getting much better, save blogs like this one.) You have to turn to a vendor like JBoss, or IBM in order to get the use-case driven documentation you need, and they do have documentation, it's just a matter of finding it. Seam 3 in particular strives to give extensive user-documentation, hopefully making things much simpler to adopt, and easier to extend. The main purpose of this article was not to bash Spring, although I may have taken that tone on occasion just for contrast and a little bit of fun. Both Spring and Java EE are strongly engineered and have strong foundations in practical use, but if you want a clean programming experience right out of the box - use Java EE 6 on JBoss Application Server 6 - JBoss Tools - and Eclipse. I will say, though, that the feeling I've gotten from the Spring forums vs the Java EE forums, is that there are far many more people willing to help you work through Java EE issues, and more available developers of the frameworks themselves to actually help you than there are on the Spring side. The community for Java EE is much larger, and much more supportive (from my personal experience.) In the end, I did get my application migrated successfully, and despite these issues (from which I learned a great deal,) I am still happy with Java EE, and would not go back to Spring! But I do look forward to further enhancements from the JBoss Seam project, which continue to make developing for Java EE simpler and more fun. Don't believe me? Try it out. Find something wrong? Tell me. Want more? Let me know what you want to hear.