Head First EJB

Chapter 2. Architectural Overview: EJB Architecture

EJB is about infrastructure. Your components are the building blocks. With EJB, you can build big applications. The kind of applications that could run everything from the Victoria’s Secret back-end to document-handling systems at CERN. But an architecture with this much flexibility, power, and scalability isn’t simple. It all begins with a distributed programming model, where clients, servers, and even different pieces of the same application are running who-knows-where on the network. But how does the client find a bean? How does the client call methods it? Why are there different bean types? Will Ben marry J-Lo?

Objectives

Background

We’re in this chapter for background, not because of an exam objective. Although, you could say that every objective in the exam depends on your understanding what’s in this chapter.

But don’t worry, we’ll have plenty of objectives beginning with Chapter 3. By Chapter 6, you will look back longingly on this chapter and remember what it was like not to have any objectives. You’ll miss this chapter when it’s gone, so savor the moments you have with it.