A Comparison between EJB and COM+ Business Components, Case Study: Response Time and Scalability

Most distributed system architectures are designed as a three-tier systems consisting of a thin-client, middleware and a database. The overall performance of such systems depends on the performance of each tier individually and the overhead incurred by the collaboration between these three tiers. Nowadays, the two most popular middleware systems are: Microsoft’s .NET platform and Sun’s Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) platform. In J2EE, the middle tier infrastructure is called Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) and in the .NET framework, it is called Component-Oriented Middle-Tier (COM+). Usually, the middle tier provides the business logic (any code that is not specifically related to storing and retrieving data, or formatting data for display to the user) and the performance of this tier is crucial to the overall performance of the distributed system.

In this paper, we will measure via real experimentation the performance of the middle-tier (business logic) of the two platforms, namely: EJB3 and COM+ 1.5, in terms of response time and scalability. Then we compare and analyze the performance of each technology under different workload scenarios.