4.8 Conclusion

This chapter provided an in-depth discussion of session beans. It explained the different types of session beans and their states and showed how session beans fit into a multitiered architecture and how they model business logic.

An extensive employee benefits enrollment example illustrated the various parts of session beans and how to use them effectively. The example showed how to use the home, remote, and local interfaces; create and remove session bean instances; use command beans to encapsulate database access; and use session bean activation and passivation.

The chapter also provided views of session beans from both the application and client developers' perspectives and summarized the tasks that the container performs for an EJB application. By managing such tasks as distributed programming, concurrency, transaction and security handling, and so forth, the bean developer can focus on the application's business logic. The next chapter goes into greater detail about the services provided by the EJB container.