Collaborate Business logic, reliability and performance?
1. Collaborate Business logic? Do you have any idea how complicated business logic could be? How much do you think a simple E-R to Java class mapping will help in this case? The classfication of entity and session beans made me feel sick at the very begining.
2. Reliability? Give me a break! Where do you think the failure comes from in the first place? EJB doesn't invent and new information at all in the work flow chain. Any piece information is from Database and will be stored into database eventually. As it claimed, it's just a middleware. So the system will definitely more reliable without a EJB than with a EJB.
3. Performance? Considering all the hassle associated with the simple-minded entity-mapping architecture, the performance is the only possible sell-point. However, in order to keep the consistency of the cache, additional communication cost is required. Even on a single server, entity bean access is synchronized anyway. So basically latency is traded for throughput, if there's any.
A few fact, the hype of EJB happened in late 1990's. Before early 2000's no vander released distributed application server. Did you ever wonder what made them buy that piece of shit in late 1990's?
Further more, I believe over 90% of user never need / used a distributed EJB system. Give me a reason why do they have to place that piece of shit in front of their Database server?
Finally, it's important to make the database schema EJB friendly if you don't want to write beans manually that follows the 1000+ page specification. However, if data structure can be so well designed, a distributed database system can handle the job better, with all performance improvement, data distribution and failover and transparency. After all, database system knows data better than EJB systems and it's easiers for database vendors to play all those tricks.
Here is some advice, in order to develop a taste of real business application architecture, you've got to learn how to do business to fuck up your customers and avoid being fucked. Apparently as a mediocre Java developer you've failed both.