Deploying an application across a number of servers poses some of the most daunting programming problems you’re ever likely to face. In addition to implementing accurate business logic, reliable database transactions, trustworthy security, and efficient load balancing, your server-side software must remain robust and responsive even when servers and network connections fail unexpectedly.
Deploying an application across a number of servers poses some of the most daunting programming problems you’re ever likely to face. In addition to implementing accurate business logic, reliable database transactions, trustworthy security, and efficient load balancing, your server-side software must remain robust and responsive even when servers and network connections fail unexpectedly.
Solving these problems is not only difficult, it’s imperative. Mission-critical applications such as reservation systems, banking, and electronic commerce require always-on access. Any downtime means loss of business.
Such large scale business applications, commonly referred to as “enterprise computing,” forces developers to bring out the big guns: expensive hardware, lots of bandwidth, replication, fail-over schemes, and hefty coding. But just like characters in a Brothers Grimm fairy tale, Java programmers go into this battle armed with a handful of beans. Well, very special beans: Enterprise Java Beans (or EJB), to be exact.
This month, let’s look at Enterprise Java Beans, or EJB. Developed by Sun Microsystems, EJB has been widely accepted as a standard model for developing and deploying complex business systems. Using a set of classes and interfaces from the Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) javax.ejb package, developers can create, assemble, and deploy components into any server system that implements the EJB specification.
EJB is a broad and complex topic, and an extensive introduction is impossible to present in this small space. Instead, let’s look at some basics and at a small example that will prepare you for some other EJB-related topics coming…
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