Enterprise JavaBeans, Third Edition

Organization

Here’s how the book is structured. The first three chapters are largely background material, placing Enterprise JavaBeans 2.0 and 1.1 in the context of related technologies and explaining at the most abstract level how the EJB technology works and what makes up an enterprise bean. Chapter 4 through Chapter 13 go into detail about developing enterprise beans of various types. Chapter 14 and Chapter 15 could be considered advanced topics, except that transactions (Chapter 14) are essential to everything that happens in enterprise computing, and design strategies (Chapter 15) help you deal with a number of real-world issues that influence bean design. Chapter 16 describes in detail the XML deployment descriptors used in EJB 2.0 and 1.1, and Chapter 17 gives an overview of Java™ 2, Enterprise Edition ( J2EE), which includes servlets, JavaServer Pages™ ( JSP), and EJB. Finally, the three appendices provide some reference information that should be useful to you.

Chapter 1

This chapter defines component transaction monitors and explains how they form the underlying technology of the Enterprise JavaBeans component model.

Chapter 2

This chapter defines the architecture of the Enterprise JavaBeans component model and examines the difference between the three basic types of enterprise beans: entity beans, session beans, and message-driven beans.

Chapter 3

This chapter explains how the EJB-compliant server manages an enterprise bean at runtime.

Chapter 4

This chapter walks the reader through the development of some simple enterprise beans.

Chapter 5

This chapter explains in detail how enterprise beans are accessed and used by a remote client application.

Chapter 6

This chapter provides an explanation of how to develop basic container-managed entity beans in EJB 2.0.

Chapter 7

This chapter picks up where Chapter 6 left off, expanding your understanding of container-managed persistence to complex bean-to-bean relationships.

Chapter 8

This chapter addresses the Enterprise JavaBeans Query Language (EJB QL), which is used to query EJBs and to locate specific entity beans in EJB 2.0 container-managed persistence.

Chapter 9

This chapter covers EJB 1.1 container-managed persistence, which is supported in EJB 2.0 for backward compatibility. Read this chapter only if you need to support legacy EJB applications.

Chapter 10

This chapter covers the development of bean-managed persistence beans including when to store, load, and remove data from the database.

Chapter 11

This chapter covers the general protocol between an entity bean and its container at runtime and applies to both container-managed persistence in EJB 2.0 and 1.1 and bean-managed persistence.

Chapter 12

This chapter shows how to develop stateless and stateful session beans.

Chapter 13

This chapter shows how to develop message-driven beans in EJB 2.0.

Chapter 14

This chapter provides an in-depth explanation of transactions and describes the transactional model defined by Enterprise JavaBeans.

Chapter 15

This chapter provides some basic design strategies that can simplify your EJB development efforts and make your EJB system more efficient.

Chapter 16

This chapter provides an in-depth explanation of the XML deployment descriptors used in EJB 1.1 and 2.0.

Chapter 17

This chapter provides an overview of J2EE v1.3 and explains how EJB 2.0 fits into this new platform.

Appendix A

This appendix provides a quick reference to the classes and interfaces defined in the EJB packages.

Appendix B

This appendix provides diagrams that clarify the life cycle of enterprise beans at runtime.

Appendix C

This appendix provides information about the vendors of EJB servers.