EJB vs. Spring

Transaction management

EJB

• must use a JTA transaction manager.
• supports transactions that span remote method calls.

Spring

• supports multiple transaction environments through its PlatformTransactionManager interface, including JTA, Hibernate, JDO, and JDBC.
• does not natively support distributed transactions—it must be used with a JTA transaction manager.

Declarative transaction support

EJB

• can define transactions declaratively through the deployment descriptor.
• can define transaction behavior per method or per class by using the wildcard character *.
• cannot declaratively define rollback behavior—this must be done programmatically.

Spring

• can define transactions declaratively through the Spring configuration file or through class metadata.
• can define which methods to apply transaction behavior explicitly or by using regular expressions.
• can declaratively define rollback behavior per method and per exception type.

Persistence

EJB

• supports programmatic bean-managed persistence and declarative container managed persistence.

Spring

• provides a framework for integrating with several persistence technologies, including JDBC, Hibernate, JDO, and iBATIS.

Declarative security

EJB

• supports declarative security through users and roles. The management and implementation of users and roles is container specific. 
• Declarative security is configured in the deployment descriptor.

Spring

• No security implementation out-of-the box.
• Acegi, an open source security framework built on top of Spring, provides declarative security through the Spring configuration file or class metadata.

Distributed computing

EJB

• provides container-managed remote method calls.

Spring

• provides proxying for remote calls via RMI, JAX-RPC, and web services.