Building Java Enterprise Applications

Chapter 6. Managers

Now that you have your database accessible through entity beans, you’re ready to move on to providing access to the Forethought directory server. Like the entity beans, classes that provide LDAP access are at a lower level of the application than that which clients will access. The classes from the last chapter, and in this one, will never be touched directly by application clients, or even by the first tier of the application. The application’s business layer will utilize these tools to access raw data and assemble that data into meaningful computations and groupings.

In this chapter, then, I’ll start by comparing entities with a new type of component, managers. You’ll see why using a manager for directory server access makes more sense than using a set of entities. You’ll then construct a basic class to allow access to a directory server. From there, I’ll move on to adding some performance tweaks to your existing code, ensuring that the application doesn’t spend unnecessary amounts of time waiting for a connection to the directory server to be established. I’ll also explain the process of managing connections to multiple servers, and touch on caching and persistence at the connection layer. This will finish up the manager class, and you’ll finally have a complete data layer.

Managers and Entities

So far, I have talked exclusively about entity components. Each instance of an entity component represents a corresponding data object, and can also store related ...