Special Edition Using Java™ 2 Enterprise Edition

Containers, Components, and Connectors

As you work with various parts of J2EE, you'll encounter the term "container" from time to time, and it might confuse you at first. Many developers tend to think of a container as a data structure like an array, a linked list, or a vector. In the J2EE world, however, a con tainer is almost like a mini-server—it provides the runtime support for the items it contains. An EJB container contains Enterprise JavaBeans and provides connection pooling and transaction processing, whereas a Servlet container contains servlets and Java Server Pages. A server can have multiple containers and objects in each container are somewhat isolated from each other, although objects in one container can communicate with objects ...