Enterprise JavaBeans, Fourth Edition

EJB Endpoints

An EJB endpoint is a stateless session bean that serves as a web service. Basically, the endpoint exposes a stateless session bean through a new component interface, called the endpoint interface; remote clients use SOAP 1.1 to access the methods defined in this interface. Because an EJB endpoint is simply a SOAP-accessible stateless session bean, it has the same advantages as other EJBs. An EJB endpoint runs in the EJB container that automatically manages transactions and security and provides access to other EJBs and resources via the JNDI ENC.

To illustrate how an EJB endpoint is developed, we’ll create a new version of the TravelAgent EJB. The revised TravelAgent will use the same logic as the TravelAgent EJB developed in Chapter 11 and the ReservationProcessor developed in Chapter 12, but it will be deployed as a stateless session bean with an endpoint interface. The TravelAgent endpoint is based on the WSDL document shown earlier in this chapter.

The WSDL Document

Every EJB endpoint must have a WSDL document that describes the web service. The <portType> declared by the WSDL document must be aligned with the endpoint interface of the web service. In other words, the mapping between the WSDL <portType> and the endpoint interface must be correct according to the JAX-RPC specification. One way to accomplish this is to create the WSDL document first, and then use it to generate the endpoint interface:

<?xml version="1.0"?> <definitions name="TravelAgent" xmlns="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/wsdl/" ...