Chapter 2. Enterprise JavaBeans Architecture Overview

This chapter provides an overview of the EJB architecture, the backbone of the J2EE platform. The EJB architecture specifies how to develop and deploy server-side application business logic components written in the Java programming language.

Enterprise beans serve as the building blocks of distributed enterprise applications. This chapter discusses the structure of enterprise beans: the enterprise bean class, its business interfaces (the home interface, the component interface, the Web service interface), the deployment descriptor, and so forth. This chapter introduces the session, entity, and message-driven enterprise bean types and explains how the three enterprise bean types model and implement different types of business logic. Finally, the chapter discusses the EJB container environment in which EJB applications run and the services and functions provided by the container.