The changes and additional services in J2EE 1.4, and therefore the EJB 2.1 specification, focus primarily on Web services. The major new goals and capabilities for EJB 2.1 are:
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Support for Web services — A new interface for Web services endpoints has been added, allowing stateless session bean implementations. All beans can access external Web services.
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A container-managed timer service — The service "provides a coarse-grained, transactional time-based event notifications [sic]".
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Generalized architecture for message-driven beans — MDBs can access various messaging types in addition to JMS messages.
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Enhanced EJB Query Language — EJB QL now has support for various aggregate and scalar functions, and results may be ordered.
For further information, see Resources.
