EasyBeans is an open-source Enterprise Java Beans (EJB) container hosted by the OW2 consortium. The License used by EasyBeans is the LGPL.
EasyBeans main goal is to ease the development of Enterprise Java Beans. It uses some new architecture design like the bytecode injection (with ASM ObjectWeb tool), IoC, POJO and can be embedded in OSGi bundles or other frameworks (Spring, Eclipse plugins, etc.).
It aims to provide an EJB3 container as specified in the Java Platform Enterprise Edition (Java EE) in its fifth version. It means that Session beans (Stateless or Stateful), Message Driven Beans (MDB) are available on EasyBeans.
The new persistence layer used by EJB 3.0 is now called Java Persistence API (or JPA). It replaces the CMP (Container Managed Persistence) model used by EJB 2.x. The default persistence provider used in EasyBeans is Hibernate Entity Manager or Apache OpenJPA but other JPA providers have been tested like for example Oracle TopLink Essentials.
What is Ebean?
Ebean is a Object Relational Mapping Persistence Layer written in Java (Open Source LGPL license).
* Providing the features of EJB3's JPA (and more)
* No container required
* JPA compatible ORM mapping (@Entity, @OneToMany, ...)
Why use Ebean?
Ebean provides a simpler approach to Object Relational Mapping. It does this by not requiring session objects such as JPA EntityManager, JDO PersistenceManager, Hibernate Session, Toplink ClientSession.