I am learning Spring using this tutorial. I am unable to get my head around the following excerpt from it:
Spring enables developers to develop enterprise-class applications using POJOs. The benefit of using only POJOs is that you do not need an EJB container product such as an application server but you have the option of using only a robust servlet container such as Tomcat or some commercial product.
In the good old days when application servers only supported EJB 2 it was a nightmare to develop services using EJBs. Each service (e.g. a stateless session bean) required a bunch of interfaces and strange additional methods to work properly (home interface, remote interface, deployment descriptors etc).
In order to run EJBs you need an application server such as Jboss or Glassfish. In order to run servlets you simply need a servlet container such as Tomcat or Jetty which is way more lightweight than an application server.
Spring offers a way of creating simple services as plain POJOs (that can be exposed via servlets). Therefore, to be able to develop services as a POJO was simply a dream come true. Services did not need all the constraining dependencies to the EJB-interfaces and they could be deployed in a lightweight servlet container.
Then came EJB3 which greatly improved life for the Java EE developer. EJBs no longer needed the dependencies for home- and remote-interfaces (at least not via inheritence). A modern EJB 3 service is very similar to a POJO-based service. The main difference is that EJBs still require an application server to be deployed.
Spring Guru Rod Johnson released the book J2EE Development without EJBs which greatly explains how to replace your old J2EE components (such as EJBs) with more lightweight Spring Pojos - good reading!