Enterprise JavaBeans, Third Edition

Chapter 4.  Developing Your First Enterprise Beans

Choosing and Setting Up an EJB Server

One of the most important features of EJB is that enterprise beans work with containers from different vendors. However, that doesn’t mean that selecting a server and installing your enterprise beans on that server are trivial processes.^[18]

The EJB server you choose should 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., enterprise 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 relational database, you may need to modify the examples to work with the product you are using.

This book does not say very much about how to install and deploy enterprise beans. That task is largely server-dependent. I’ll provide some general ideas about how to organize JAR files and create deployment descriptors, but for a complete description of the deployment process, you’ll have to refer to your vendor’s documentation or look at the workbook for your vendor.

This ...