Database Programming with JDBC & Java, Second Edition

Chapter 8. Distributed Component Models

Beings are, so to speak, interrogated with regard to their being. But if they are to exhibit the characteristics of their being without falsification, they must for their part have become accessible in advance as they are in themselves. The question of being demands that the right access to being be gained and secured in advance with regard to what it interrogates.

— Martin Heidegger, Being and Time

As a phenomenologist, Heidegger believed that there was no purpose in seeking an underlying truth to a being beyond that truth it exposed to the world outside—in other words, one is what one does. The phenonomological approach actually applies very well to software engineering, in which one of your central tasks, especially in a business system, is to identify key concepts in the business, capture them in software, and expose them to the outside world. When I introduced Enterprise JavaBeans as the centerpiece of the Java 2 Enterprise Edition in Chapter 6, I noted that EJB was a distributed component model. A component model specifies how objects should be written in order to make themselves accessible to the outside world. A good component model is backed by an open standard so that a system can be built from components developed by many independent sources.

EJB takes care of almost everything covered in this book for you. In other words, if you deploy a container-managed EJB application, you can be successful without knowing JDBC or component ...