EJB.1.2 What Is New in EJB 1.1

We have tightened the entity bean specification, and made support for entity beans mandatory for container providers.

The other changes in the EJB 1.1 specification were made to improve the support for the development, application assembly, and deployment of ISV-produced enterprise beans. The specification includes the following primary changes:

• Enhanced support for the enterprise bean's environment. The bean provider must specify all the bean's environmental dependencies using entries in a JNDI naming context.

• Added support for application assembly in the deployment descriptor.

• Clearly separated the responsibilities of the bean provider and application assembler.

• Removed the EJB 1.0 deployment descriptor features that describe the deployer's output. the role of the deployment descriptor is to describe the information that is the input to the deployer, not the deployer's output .

The changes affected mainly Chapters EJB.11, EJB.14, EJB.15, and EJB.16. We minimized the impact on the server vendors who implemented support for EJB 1.0 in their runtime. The only change to the runtime API of the EJB container is the replacement of the java.security.Identity class with the java.security.Principal interface, necessitated by changes in JDK 1.2.

We have also added a number of clarifications and corrections to the specification based on the input that we have received from the reviewers.