1.3 Conclusion

This chapter's high-level discussion of the various enterprise application architectures described their advantages and disadvantages. It showed how these architectures have evolved to the EJB architecture and highlighted its unique benefits from the perspective of both the developer and the customer, or client.

The chapter also introduced the terms bean developer, deployer, and system administrator three of the six major roles defined by the EJB architecture. These roles are described further in Chapter 3, Enterprise JavaBeans Roles.

From here, we focus on the EJB architecture in greater detail. Chapter 2 provides an overview of that architecture.