3.3 Conclusion

By now, you should have a good understanding of the major functional areas of the EJB architecture. This chapter introduced and explained the six major functional areas, or roles, encompassed by the EJB architecture. These roles correlate with real-life enterprise positions jobs that must be carried out to develop and implement an enterprise application. Subsequent chapters view the various parts of the EJB architecture from the perspective of these roles.

Keep the six roles in mind as you read the following chapters. In particular, the chapters illustrating the session bean (Chapter 4) and entity bean (Chapter 8) example applications discuss the roles that implement or are responsible for various parts of these applications. In some cases, these views may differ greatly from one another because each role sees different facets of an enterprise application according to its own functional responsibilities.