A friend and I are building a fairly complex website based on java. (PHP would have been more obvious but we chose for java because the educational aspect of this project is important to us)

We have already decided to use JSF (with richfaces) for the front end and JPA for the backend and so far we have decided not to use EJB3 for the business layer.

The reason we've decided not to use EJB3 is because - and please correct me if I am wrong - if we use EJB3 we can only run it on a full blown java application server like jboss and if we don't use EJB3 we can still run it on a lightweight server like tomcat. We want to keep speed and cost of our future web server in mind.

So far i've worked on two JEE projects and both used the full stack with

• web
• business logic
• factories/persistence service
• entities

with every layer a seperate module.

Now here is my question, if you dont use EJB3 in the business logic layer. What does the layer look like? Please tell what is common practice when developing java web projects without ejb3? Do you think business logic layer can be thrown out altogether and have business logic in the backing beans? If you keep the layer, do you have all business methods static? Or do you initialize each business class as needed in the backing beans in every session as needed?