JEE 6 and 7, something to think about
I recently switched jobs and I have being working on upgrading our applications to JEE 6. Our applications run currently on oc4j(J2EE 1.3). I never heard of oc4j until I took this position.
What I notice is that JEE has made some really good improvements. Things just work. I have being using spring for years and I still love spring. I think a mixture of spring and JEE would be great for any development environment.
The ease of EJBs development is as easy as annotating and your beans get discovered by the container and injected to a managed bean that needs the dependency being requested for.