Head First EJB

Tutorial:

Let’s make, deploy, and test the AdviceBean

We’ll write the code, compile it, start the server, start the deploytool, use the deploytool to make the DD and the ejb-jar, deploy the bean, create a client, and test the bean using the client. The only thing we won’t do is install and configure the server. We assume you already did that.

If you don’t yet have the J2EE 1.3 RI up and running, go to http://java.sun.com/j2ee/ and download version 1.3 of J2EE (it includes set-up instructions), then go back and download the J2EE API documentation.

Note

Remember, the exam is for J2EE 1.3, NOT 1.4! Whatever you do, do NOT study for the exam using the 1.4 spec. See the intro for more details about why the exam uses 1.3 and not 1.4—the short version is: we don’t want to certify folks on something that almost nobody is using. Certification is NOT about “I know the latest and greatest release”. It’s about “I know the technology that people are using now. I’ve been using it for at least six months.”

Which server would we use? We use the RI for learning and practicing because we don’t know which server you’ll need to use, and the RI is the simplest of all the freely-available servers. We want it to be as easy as possible for you to focus on EJB technology and ignore the tool-specific tasks.

Open source products like JBoss are still real production servers, so they tend to have a lot more configuration and administration tasks to cope with. Using the RI lets you spend more time doing the things you’ll have to do, regardless of the server, with the least amount of time spent learning a server-specific approach to those things.

Relax

There’s nothing on the exam about the J2EE RI.

Or any other application server. You don’t have to know about any vendor tools (including Sun’s) for development or deployment. You do need to know what capabilities every EJB-compliant server will have, but you don’t need to know any vendor-specific features or configuration details.