I readed at System.out blog the best description of how EJB 3.0 is taking shape, from who and from where it is copying ideas. I have used a few persistence frameworks, from in house developed, from designed for another non Java Language (Sparky from VisualBanker - Smalltalk) and the infamous VisualAge persistence framework (this one I thougth was what IBM submitted to the EJB 1.0 JSR group, because they are nearly identical and was available on Smalltak and Java editions), to Hibernate recently. My humble opinion is that this way to define a spec is the best one, let the implementors tell how are their solutions and take the best parts of each one.

The main topic of that blog entry is about the misconception that EJB 3.0 is Hibernate; it is not, but it can not be denied that Hibernate was one of the frameworks that helped EJB 3.0 take shape.