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EJB3 is going to kick ass, even though the current beta implementations are inconsistent and not there yet.

Example: Oracle JDeveloper has EJB3 support (very basic as there are no wizards and things that are available for EJB2). It uses TopLink as its persistency provider. Unfortunately it is not updated to the latest spec versions, for example I have found that the @GeneratedValue annotation does not work, I had to use the @Id (generated=AUTO) notation.
The documentation is also not updated, and sometimes points to non-existent configuration options and such.

To my great surprise, Sun's beta Application Server also uses TopLink as the embedded EJB3 persistency provider, but a newer build which supports generatedvalue! On the other hand, I saw from the startup process, that it also uses Hibernate for something, as it logs stuff to the console.

Another Sun AppServer quirk: I saw hssqldb dumping stuff on the console, on the other hand it uses Apache Derby to persist the entities as a default embedded db...I don't even dare to look at what jarfest is in there. Still, props to the Netbeans 5.5/Sun app server beta, as I managed to code and deploy my first EJB3 package with entities and session beans in it without much struggle.

I wasn't able to run the EJB3 enabled JBoss beta on my PowerBook, I suspect it is unhappy with my Apple 1.5 JDK.

Anyways, the standard itself is pretty much all we can hope for in Javaland. I am quite willing to accept the current beta stuff to be able to play with the features. The persistency API is a joy, and the dependency injection stuff makes it easy to work with the beans. The new 1.5 language features do make it even more clean.

Interesting thought - if someone starts to learn and work with Java EE next year, the lucky bastard will probably never have to understand what we had to work with in current J2EE versions. It's just a well thought out, clean and consistent set of APIs, based on plain Java objects. I am not so enthusiastic about the web layer yet, but stuff like the Stripes framework is quite non-threatening, and should be easy to pick up for web developers.

Most of the drudgery is going to be gone, soon, and we can point to Java EE's strong localization features, the undeniable strength of integration APIs, BPEL engines, refactoring IDEs, and so on, the next time a kid from a Scandinavian country comes in and tells Java people us to pack up shop :-)

Competition is fantastic. Just look at how much Netbeans or even JDeveloper strenghtened under the highly competitive situation, and how much the Java Web frameworks are focusing now on simplicity and ease of use, no doubt at least partially because of Rails' relentless push and undeniable attractiveness as a Web development framework.