Enterprise JavaBeans, Fourth Edition

Primary Services

Many value-added services are available for distributed applications. This book looks at eight value-added services called the primary services because they are required to complete the Enterprise JavaBeans platform. The primary services include concurrency, transactions, persistence, distributed objects, asynchronous messaging, timer, naming, and security. EJB servers automatically manage all the primary services. This capability relieves the application developers from the task of mastering these complicated services. Instead, developers can focus on defining the business logic that describes the system and leave the system-level concerns to the EJB server. The following sections describe each of the primary services and explain how they are supported by EJB.

Concurrency

Concurrency is important to all the bean types, but it has different meanings for each type.

Concurrency with session and entity beans

Session beans do not support concurrent access. This limitation makes sense if you consider the nature of stateful and stateless session beans. A stateful bean is an extension of one client and serves only that client. It doesn’t make sense to make stateful beans concurrent if they are used only by the clients that created them. Stateless session beans don’t need to be concurrent because they don’t maintain state that needs to be shared. The scope of the operations performed by a stateless bean is limited to the scope of each method invocation. Because neither ...