What does a stateless session bean provide over just a normal class?

Question

What would a stateless session bean provide over just a regular class that has the same methods? It seems that a stateful session bean can be distributed out of the box and the container will make sure that the state looks the same to clients anywhere. With a stateless session bean what is provided that you would not get with a normal class?

Is it just that your EJB tier can fail over if you have a distributed environment? It seems to me that you can get a local or remote instance of a stateless session bean, if I only use one server for my application and thus never use the remote interface is there any benefit?

Answer 1

EJBs give you declarative security, transactions and remoting. When you call one of the EJB's methods, you actually pass through a stack of interceptors that provide the above layers of functionality.

A Plain Old Java Object wouldn't do any of that. Of course, if you don't need any of that, then EJBs are not necessary.