EJB 3.0 has simplified the usage of session beans considerably (and presumably message beans as well). Gone are home interfaces and PortableRemoteObject.narrow(). The stubs and proxies are all but invisible. But, clients still need to bootstrap using vendor-specific means. The "Java EE application client" approach is still suggested (i.e. running your application in a client-side container). Running outside of a client container (as a "stand-alone" client) still requires vendor-specific JARs and JNDI configuration. You'd think they fix this. Someday, perhaps. Entity beans are gone completely, however -- hooray! You have to learn the new JPA API, though...