<i>They came out of sheer self defense out of the amount of toil &#38; trouble that you have to go through using what the bare bones Java EE gave you.</i><p>This describes an awful lot of enterprise Java.  My most recent discovery was RestEasy, which a) took a week to get working and b) was at least ten times less painful than our previous web services implementation, to the point where I am tempted to delete the wiki, nuke the repository, and cover up any evidence of ever using SOAP or XML-RPC for fear that an incautious code archeologist in the future might open the jar and release the horror upon the world again.