The original goal of EJB's was to push functional decomposition out onto the network. Entity beans were always a disaster, and Stateful Session Beans had scali

The original goal of EJB's was to push functional decomposition out onto the network. Entity beans were always a disaster, and Stateful Session Beans had scaling problems, but Stateless Session beans by the time of EJB3 were an easy way to push logic out to the network while getting a whole bunch of stuff (pooling, scaling, failover, transaction management, security, etc) for free. These days they'd be calling them micro services. The main problem was combining everything into the big ball of mud that is J2EE. If they had let each component live and die on its own merits I think the ecosystem would be in a much better state today.