The J2EE™ Tutorial Second Edition

Other Enterprise Bean Features

The topics that follow apply to session beans and entity beans.

Accessing Environment Entries

Stored in an enterprise bean's deployment descriptor, an environment entry is a name-value pair that allows you to customize the bean's business logic without changing its source code. An enterprise bean that calculates discounts, for example, might have an environment entry named Discount Percent. Before deploying the bean's application, you could run a development tool to assign Discount Percent a value of 0.05 in the bean's deployment descriptor. When you run the application, the bean fetches the 0.05 value from its environment.

In the following code example, the applyDiscount method uses environment entries to calculate ...