Preface

Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) technology is a core part of the Java EE 5 specification. EJB is a framework for building enterprise-scale object-oriented, distributed, component-based business applications. EJB business applications are written in Java, are scalable and can be deployed on any platform that supports the EJB specification.

EJB applications are deployed to and execute under the control of an EJB container. The EJB container provides services typically required by enterprise applications such as security, transaction management, resource pooling, and systems management.

The EJB 3 specification, released in May 2006, is a radical change from previous versions of the technology. Developing business applications is considerably easier with EJB 3. The handling of persistence in particular has radically changed in EJB 3. Persistence is no longer a service provided by an EJB container but rather by a persistence provider conforming to the Java Persistence API (JPA) specification. Java applications which need to be persisted but which do not require the services provided by an EJB container can be persisted outside an EJB container by a JPA persistence provider. In this book we cover JPA as well as the core EJB 3 services.

This book is a concise, example-driven introduction to EJB 3. The best way to learn a new software technology is by studying and trying out programming examples. In this book you will see a lot of code and one example after another. We do not assume any prior knowledge of EJB. However this book does assume at least a couple of years’ experience of Java and some knowledge of relational database technology. The examples in this book have been deployed on the GlassFish application server. GlassFish was chosen primarily because this is the Java EE 5 reference implementation.