I can only say just use the parts you like and ignore the rest. I lived through EJB 1.0. Spring and Hibernate are massive improvements compared to that and the

I can only say just use the parts you like and ignore the rest. I lived through EJB 1.0. Spring and Hibernate are massive improvements compared to that and the community and software parts will continue to evolve. BTW, I would like to point out that design patterns are just syntactical/mental constructs for programmers to do something in a less expressive programming language. For example, the Visitor pattern makes very little sense if you have functions as first-class values, i.e. closures. Same for the pub-sub pattern if you have used a programming language which support dataflow variables.