What Is Enterprise JavaBeans?
When Java™ was first introduced in the summer of 1995, most of the IT industry focused on its graphical user interface characteristics and the competitive advantage it offered in terms of distribution and platform independence. Those were interesting times. The applet was king, and only a few of us were attempting to use Java on the server side. In reality, we spent about half of our time coding and the other half trying to convince management that Java was not a fad.
Today, the focus has broadened considerably: Java has been recognized as an excellent platform for creating enterprise solutions, specifically for developing distributed server-side applications. This shift has much to do with Java’s emerging role as a universal language for producing implementation-independent abstractions for common enterprise technologies. The JDBC™ API is the first and most familiar example. JDBC (Java Database Connectivity) provides a vendor-independent Java interface for accessing SQL relational databases. This abstraction has been so successful that it’s difficult to find a relational database vendor that doesn’t support JDBC. Java abstractions for enterprise technologies have expanded considerably to include JNDI for abstracting directory services, JTA (Java Transaction API) for abstracting access to transaction managers, JMS (Java Message Service) for abstracting access to different message-oriented middleware products, and more.
Enterprise JavaBeans, first introduced ...