Enterprise JavaBeans, Second Edition

The Bean-Container Contract

The environment that surrounds the beans on the EJB server is often referred to as the container. The container is more a concept than a physical construct. Conceptually, the container acts as an intermediary between the bean class and the EJB server. The container manages the EJB objects and EJB homes for a particular type of bean and helps these constructs to manage bean resources and apply primary services like transactions, security, concurrency, naming, and so forth, to the bean instances at runtime. Conceptually, an EJB server may have many containers, each of which may contain one or more types of enterprise beans. As you will discover a little later, the container and the server are not clearly different constructs, but the EJB specification defines the component model in terms of the container responsibilities, so we will follow that convention here.

Enterprise bean components interface with the EJB server through a well-defined component model. The EntityBean and SessionBean interfaces are the bases of this component model. As we learned earlier, these interfaces provide callback methods that notify the bean class of state management events in its life cycle. At runtime, the container invokes the callback methods on the bean instance when appropriate state management events occur. When the container is about to write an entity bean instance’s state to the database, for example, it first calls the bean instance’s ejbStore() method. This ...