Introduction to EJB

Notice

This is a personal view of EJB and the Java Enterprise Platform (J2EE). I expect that is does not nearly cover the scope of these technologies or bring out the many applications in which they could be used. However I have found it difficult to find concise descriptions of the beneifts of EJB and J2EE and I hope this brief introduction may at least spark some ideas and further Interest.

General

Most business systems (and many others) can be viewed as a number of transactions between different components of the business. For example buying a ticket involves a transaction from the request to the seller, which then could cause multiple transations to stock control, accounts etc. Each of these transactions and the items that they work on can be represented by Enterprise JavaBeans, and the environment in which they work is J2EE.

Enterprise Beans

Enterprise beans come in two flavours: entity beans and session beans. Typically entity beans represent ideas that can be expressed as nouns - a customer, an item, a place, or any other 'real-world' object. On the other hand session beans tend to manage 'transactions' - the process of buying a ticket,

Enterprise Platform

The environment in which these beans exist provides much of the power of the whole concept. Entity beans (which represent real-world objects) are 'persistant' - they need to maintain state - and the platform provides a variety of mechanisms for easily storing this state. Session beans doesn't retain state, but needs to manage transations - this involves the ability to recover from particular functions that might not suceed. For example, two ticking buying processes might be competing for the last seat - one of these processes will need to abort the transaction and recover any state changes back to their origional states. The platform also provides mechanisms for this.

The Big Winner

All the above things can be implemented reasonably well in other systems - where J2EE wins is in the scaleability of the system. Object pooling, location independence and flexibility mean that systems can be build that will handle huge number of transactions reliably. Objects can be seamless distributed between multiple servers.

Finding Out More

Books

Enterprise JavaBeans by Richard Monson-Haefel Published by O'Reilly & Associates 1999 ISBN 1-56592-605-6
Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition by Bill Shannon et al. Published by Addison-Wesley 2000 ISBN 0-201-70456-0

Web Sites