Migrating EJB2.x BMP entity beans

Question

We use EJB2.x entity beans with BMP (bean managed persistence). It appears BMP is not supported in EJB3. We had wanted to stay current and upgrade to EJB3. Does anyone know if there are in fact any BMP options available in 3.0?

From what I can tell, using 3.0, all entity beans have to use JPA and by definition ORM. There are some options to use native SQL but that is still just a way to use JPA to implement ORM.

I wasn't sure if there is another EJB3 approach to achieve the same functionality as with EJB2.x BMP entity beans. We currently use the standard ejbStore method to update the DB through native SQL and the ejbLoad method to lookup all beans and to refresh the bean in the event of a transaction rollback. I thought you might be able to do this with EJB3 session beans but I wasn't sure.

Perhaps instead of migrating to EJB3 beans we should migrate to Spring.

Answer 1

If you really want to code SQL by hand, go for POJOs and raw JDBC DAOs. But this is also maybe an opportunity to rethink the way you're doing things and embrace ORM/JPA.

Answer 2

In the past, I have mixed Hibernate + EJB2 (CMP + BMP) sharing transactional contexts with no issues, using JTA.

This problem is quite similar... Take a look at https://cwiki.apache.org/GMOxDOC22/developing-bean-managed-persistence-with-jpa.html. You can implement your own EntityManager.

With luck, you may be even able to share transactional contexts.