The deployment descriptors are no longer required; everything can be accomplished using metadata annotations.

The CMP (Container Managed Persistence) has been simplified; it is now more like Hibernate or JDO.

Programmatic defaults have been incorporated. For example, the transaction model is set to REQUIRED by default. The value needs to be set only if a specific value other than the default value is desired.

The use of checked exceptions is reduced; the RemoteException is no longer mandatory on each remote business method.

Inheritance is now allowed; therefore, beans can extend some of the base code.

The native SQL queries are supported as an EJB-QL (Query Language) enhancement.