How This Book Is Organized

This book is organized into five parts that walk you through the concepts behind EJB and the process of designing and implementing your own enterprise beans. Related topics have been organized to build your knowledge of EJB programming as you progress through the book.

Part I, "Developing Enterprise JavaBeans," teaches you the mechanics of building EJB classes and their interfaces. This part begins with an overview of component-based development and describes the role of EJB within a multitier architecture. The chapters that follow introduce each of the enterprise bean types with detailed examples that teach you what you need to know to begin building and deploying your own EJBs. To be sure you understand the other J2EE technologies that EJB relies on directly, separate chapters provide in-depth coverage of the Java Naming and Directory Interface (JNDI) and the Java Message Service (JMS). This part also defines the role of transactions within EJB applications and describes exception handling and security management.

Part II, "Design and Performance," goes beyond the basics of building EJBs and introduces you to a set of design and performance strategies to apply to your enterprise development efforts. Although EJB is a relatively new technology, there are already standard practices emerging that you must be aware of as a designer. This part also includes a discussion of several approaches you can take to stress test your applications.

Part III, "Building the Web Tier," crosses the boundary of what you might expect to see in an EJB book. The chapter included here looks at several patterns you can apply to building a servlet- and JSP-based presentation tier that interacts with an application tier built using EJB.

Part IV, "Advanced Concepts," gets you up to speed on the concerns of experienced EJB developers. Here you'll get information on a new requirement introduced with EJB 2.0 that makes it possible for an EJB to communicate with CORBA objects or EJBs running in another vendor's container. You'll also be introduced to some recommended practices for building a foundational service layer for your applications. To build on the performance chapter in Part II, you'll also learn about clustering of EJB components and services here. The final chapter in Part IV will especially interest you if you're the type of person who always wants to know why when someone tells you not to do something. This chapter looks in particular at the things you're not supposed to do within the EJB container and why.

Part V, "Appendixes," offers some quick-reference material that includes a summary of the EJB 2.0 API and a description of what's changed since EJB 1.1.