Feature

EJB

Spring

Transaction management

• Must use a JTA transaction manager.
• Supports transactions that span remote method calls.

• Supports multiple transaction environments through its PlatformTransactionManager interface, including JTA, Hibernate, JDO, and JDBC.
• Does not natively support distributed transactions—it must be used with a JTA transaction manager.

Declarative transaction support

• Can define transactions declaratively through the deployment descriptor.
• Can define transaction behavior per method or per class by using the wildcard character *.
• Cannot declaratively define rollback behavior—this must be done programmatically.

• Can define transactions declaratively through the Spring configuration file or through class metadata.
• Can define which methods to apply transaction behavior explicitly or by using regular expressions.
• Can declaratively define rollback behavior per method and per exception type.

Persistence

Supports programmatic bean-managed persistence and declarative container managed persistence.

Provides a framework for integrating with several persistence technologies, including JDBC, Hibernate, JDO, and iBATIS.

Declarative security

• Supports declarative security through users and roles. The management and implementation of users and roles is container specific.
• Declarative security is configured in the deployment descriptor.

• No security implementation out-of-the box.
• Acegi, an open source security framework built on top of Spring, provides declarative security through the Spring configuration file or class metadata.

Distributed computing

Provides container-managed remote method calls.

Provides proxying for remote calls via RMI, JAX-RPC, and web services.