Chapter 4. Developing Your First Enterprise Beans
Choosing and Setting Up an EJB Server
One of the most important features of EJB is that beans should work with containers from different vendors. That doesn’t mean that selecting a server and installing your beans on that server are trivial processes. We’ll start this chapter with a general discussion of how you select and set up a server.
The EJB server you choose should be compliant with the EJB 1.0 or EJB 1.1 specification. However, in the EJB 1.0 version of the specification, support for entity beans and container-managed persistence is optional. In EJB 1.1, support for entity beans is required. The first example in this chapter—and most of the examples in this book—assume that your EJB server supports entity beans and container-managed persistence.[10] The EJB server you choose should also provide a utility for deploying an enterprise bean. It doesn’t matter whether the utility is command-line oriented or graphical, as long as it does the job. The deployment utility should allow you to work with prepackaged enterprise beans, i.e., beans that have already been developed and archived in a JAR file. Finally, the EJB server should support an SQL-standard relational database that is accessible using JDBC. For the database, you should have privileges sufficient for creating and modifying a few simple tables in addition to normal read, update, and delete capabilities. If you have chosen an EJB server that does not support an SQL standard ...