Why JavaEE / EJB3?

Greetings all,
For a current project, I'm trying to decide whether to stick with how
we've always done it or whether to invest the time, energy, and resources
into making it a full J2EE app. I've never worked with ejb, jms, etc before.
The "way we've always done it" is Tomcat/jsp/jstl/pojo. No servlets, no
MVC, no need for multiple clients (swing vs. html vs. mini devices), no need
for internationalization. just straight up database (via jndi and datasource
setup in server.xml) and html (ala jsp).

What i'm trying to guague is whether moving to java ee will reduce our
complexity and maintenance, save coding time, and basically just help me get
this damn thing out the door as quick and painlessly as possible, given our
needs.

1) have to be able to run this on a cluster of servers with session
failover. load balancing is done with cisco hardware (I think). but if user
1 hits server a on one request and server b on second request, obviously his
session has to move with him. IDEALLY, ear/war files would all be in one
location, say, a NAS device, with all nodes in the cluster pointing to that
one deployed file.

2) need to manage 3-4 different environments with the least amount of pain
possible: dev, test, staging, prod. problems would be in location of the
code relative to the server, database names (datasource name would be the
same, but the URL for the database would be different in all 3
environments), etc. for example, on dev, the code might live at
\\server\share\code\version but on prod it would be at
\\server\someothershare\share\code

3) all the other usual requirements: session/application state, etc.

4) a handful (less than 5) chunks will be exposed as web services. typically
we've done this via AXIS with good results.

5) we'd be using jboss/tomcat if we went the java ee route

6) eclipse plugins that would help get people up to speed would be nice

7) easy debugging. don't want to have to restart the server everytime a
change is made to a jsp or class file

I suppose the problem is that since i don't know much about the java ee
stack, i don't know at all how, if at all, it can help me solve these
problems or solve them with less complexity than would be involved in just
sticking with the current method. I imagine the scenario i describe above
is so common that everybody does it and that there are thousands of articles
and opinions and best practices.

Forgive me if i'm not asking the right questions...possibly i don't even
know what questions to ask without learning more about the java ee stack.
i'm currently doing that right now and am hoping for some guidance.

thanks a lot for all opinions.

Marc



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