Component Transaction Monitors (CTMs) are relatively new types of application servers that perform a number of services, such as [2]:

• Connectivity between distributed objects and their clients

• Transaction handling

• Concurrency

• Persistence

• Security

• Resource pooling

• Load-balancing

Connectivity is provided by object request brokers (ORBs).  It is the other services that distinguish an ORB from a CTM.  Developers using ORBs must handle those considerations, forcing them to deal with the same low-level issues for each application.

Enterprise JavaBeans are not revolutionary.  The EJB architecture is essentially a specification and Java API that provide abstractions for the services of a CTM.  It allows distributed Java components to be developed in a vendor-independent manner.  Vendors may implement the services very differently, but they must all conform to the EJB specification and interfaces to be considered Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE)-compliant.