Ken Saks, the Specification Lead for EJB 3.1 and a Senior Staff Engineer in the Java EE team at sun gives a good overview of what can be expected in EJB 3.1. A Proposed Final Draft of the EJB 3.1 specification is now available. The main goals of this new specification are to further simplify development using EJB technology and to add a number of long-requested features such as singleton beans.

EJB 3.1 will be included in Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) 6. A preview version of Java EE 6 is currently available for download. The preview version includes a nearly complete implementation of EJB 3.1 and a sample application that takes advantage of some of the new features in EJB 3.

Read his full article here.

ps, I would be interested in peoples viewpoints on this. I have gone through some interesting times a few years ago, with the then very heavyweight EJBs being replaced by more lightweight solutions like Spring and Hibernate. What are your views on this? Would you use it and how would it fit in your architecture?