Enterprise JavaBeans, Fourth Edition

Chapter 3. Resource Management and the Primary Services

Chapter 2 discussed the basic architecture of Enterprise JavaBeans, including the relationship between the bean class, the component interfaces, the EJB object and EJB home, and the EJB container. These artifacts define a common model for distributed server-side components. But the common model for distributed objects isn’t enough to make EJB interesting or even particularly useful. EJB servers also manage the resources used by beans, and can manage thousands, even millions of distributed objects simultaneously. They must manage how distributed objects use memory, threads, database connections, processing power, and more. Furthermore, the EJB specification defines interfaces that help developers take advantage of these common practices.

In particular, EJB servers support six primary services: concurrency, transaction management, persistence, object distribution, naming, and security. These services provide the kind of infrastructure that is necessary for a successful three-tier system. Enterprise JavaBeans also supports two additional services: asynchronous messaging and a timer service.

This chapter discusses the resource-management facilities and the primary services that are available to Enterprise JavaBeans.

Resource Management

A large business system with many users can easily require thousands of objects—even millions of objects—to be in use simultaneously. As the number of interactions among these objects increases, concurrency ...