Enterprise JavaBeans

The new version of container-managed persistence (CMP) beans in 2.0 is more portable and robust than in the older 1.1 version. Most significant is the introduction of the relationship fields, which allow entity beans to declare relationships with each other as natural references. In order to make this huge leap in component relationships possible, EJB 2.0 had to redesign how entity beans are defined and interact. Our new 3rd edition examines this critical CMP model in detail.

Local interfaces are thoroughly discussed as well. Local interfaces allow beans that are co-located to interact without the overhead of remote method calls. This improves the performance of beans considerably and complements the CMP relationship fields.

Message driven beans are a new kind of enterprise bean based on asynchronous messaging and the Java Message service (JMS). Instead of responding to Java RMI calls, message driven beans process JMS messages sent by messaging clients. An entire chapter is devoted to message-driven beans and how to use them effectively.

In addition, the 3rd edition contains an architecture overview, information on resource management and primary services, design strategies, and XML deployment descriptors.

Amazon.com Review
As many Java developers and IS managers already know, Sun's powerful Enterprise JavaBean (EJB) technology offers an attractive option for developing server-side components. A suitable read for both managers and Java programmers, Enterprise JavaBeans provides a surprisingly clear and engaging introduction to designing and programming with EJBs.

The tour of the EJB component model presented here centers on several beans created and tested for a travel reservation system in a fictitious cruise ship company. The samples are just right in scale, large enough to test out key concepts in design and deployment, but small enough to be comprehensible, even to those who are not Java experts. The author pays close attention to the real-world issues of deployment with EJBs (as well as the differences among the vendor application servers that run them).

While there are enough details in Java syntax for designing both entity and session beans for the developer, sections on design here will please those who manage projects without delving much into code. Later, the author shows various ways to design entity and session beans. (For instance, entity beans can allow their bean containers to handle the details of connecting to a database, or they can do it themselves. This book demonstrates both approaches.) When it comes to session beans (which "wire" together entity beans to do real work), the author's introduction to managing state and transactions is also a standout. Tips for performance and reusability close out the book.

In all, Enterprise JavaBeans provides an engaging tour of one of the most promising component technologies. It's technically astute, but thoroughly approachable too, and can serve the needs of any manager or Java developer considering EJBs for future projects. --Richard Dragan

Topics covered: Enterprise JavaBeans (EJBs) basics, distributed architectures, Component Transaction Monitors (CTMs), bean-containers, home and remote bean interfaces, resource management, configuring EJB servers, entity beans, JNDI, container-managed and bean-managed persistence, session beans, stateless and stateful beans, transactions, design and performance hints.

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All Customer Reviews
Average Customer Review:
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

Good reference book .. Not for learning the basics, 2008-09-30
I started reading this book with a basic understanding of EJB 3.0. But the book does not keep you interested in the topic. I found the reference manual more interesting. I use this as a reference book.


0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

Everything EJB, 2008-08-29
This book covers almost everything related to EJBs in their new reincarnation. Its author have rightfully chosen to scrap any information concerning EJB 2.1. This is the right path to take as the new 3.X standard is so radically different (read much more useful) from the earlier versions.

The book starts out with a fairly detailed introduction to JPA 1.0 persistence mappings, entity relations and inheritance. It then moves on to covering session beans, interceptors, JAX-WS/RPC, the JNDI ENC and JTA.

This is a massive amount of stuff and still the author manages to convey its primary use, pitfalls and corner cases in an engaging technical style. So from a topical point of view you get what you pay for (and then some). The book is however not without some problems. First of all it contains some annoying errors, like:

1) In the interceptor chapter, the author fails to inform you that EJB interceptors are only used on direct invocations. That is if you put a interceptor on EJB A and inject it into EJB B, then delegated method invocations on EJB A from B are not intercepted. This is annoying at best, and at worst it could be considered an enormous flaw in the EJB spec.

2) Some JPA information is just plain wrong (like the use of named parameters in native queries). Most of these errors can be traced back to the fact that the author uses Hibernate which indeed supports this non-standard functionality. While understandable, it does confuse you some when confronted with strange errors in other containers

Many other errors exists and this book badly needs a review from some of the other EJB/JPA spec members, preferably someone not involved with the JBoss container. Another and more grave problem is the fact that the book presents most technologies as separate entities, and thereby you fail to see the complete picture. I really miss a complete real life EJB applications including:

1) Security (propagation of client role to the server (i.e. getCallerPrincipal)).
2) Interceptors (for logging and security).
3) Use of EJBs from a web application.
4) Testing of EJBs (best practices for easy unit testing).
5) Packaging and compiling (these days you cannot write a JEE book without a complete Maven sample)

This might sound like allot of grief, but I still choose to give the book four stars from the simple fact that it is complete, contains allot of useful samples (like the .NET SOAP application client) and manages to make many hard topics easy to understand.

In general a well written and useful book with a heap of information, written in a pragmatic style without to much fluff.



0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

Great EJB3 Book! You will be greatly pleased with your purchase., 2008-06-28
This is a great introduction to EJBs in general, and now EJB3. (the JSR 220 standard) Just like EJBs are now easier to develop with version 3, so is it easy to read and study this book. I hold O'Reilly in a high regard, (doesn't mean I'm a fan boy though, they do have their share of bad apples) and their high standards show in the quality of writing in this book. You will be happy with your purchase.


0 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

Good but outdated, 2008-05-18
To be brief, this is a great book, but you will almost certainly want the newest edition of it.


0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

Is Good but Quality down in the code, 2008-03-31
I recommend this book. The book cover almost topics in EJB 3.0 and you can depend it for preparing the SCBCD 5. The author explain and describe the topics in easy way.

The problem of this book have more error in code I escalation it for author. cause the book have his name not auditor name.

I will give this book three stars for losing the quality.

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