Okay, they're not really the devil, bad architecture is the devil. With the business layer passing stuff to the presentation layer, which then processes it and passes it back to the business layer for more modifications. Our EJB's depend on our servlet classes, which depend on other EJB's, which depend on some shared classes which depend on other EJB's.
The people ("Consultants") who set this up are long gone. We've made due by following their "strategy" of putting everything in the system classpath, and we're trying to fix that, but it's just about an intractable problem.
Hint; if your EJB's import javax.servlet or servlets of your own, then you probably aren't going to win the "architecture of the year" award.
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