Special Edition Using Enterprise JavaBeans™ 2.0

What Is a Session Bean?

In Chapter 5, “Entity Beans,” you were introduced to the first type of enterprise bean. This chapter introduces you to the second type, the session bean. Just as entity beans have a purpose in manipulating persistent data, session beans have a purpose in executing business logic on behalf of a client. In fact, you can think of a session bean as an extension of a client. The EJB architecture provides to session beans the same transactional, security, and concurrency support given entity beans. This allows clients to execute reusable business logic running in an application server to do transactional work. The container takes care of the low-level details, so the session bean and client application developers can focus ...