Chapter 12. Session Beans

• Introduction to Enterprise JavaBeans

• EJB Views and the UML

• Session Beans

• Types of Session Beans and Conversational State

• Instance Passivation

• Transactions

• Session Bean Technology

• Modeling Interface Behavior

• Session Bean Life Cycle

• Session Bean Common Scenarios

• Modeling Session Bean Relationships

• Managing Performance

• The Local Client

• Identifying Session Beans in Enterprise Applications

• Summary

Process Check: Once again our focus is on design as we progress through the Rational Unified Process (RUP) analysis and design discipline. We also discuss some aspects of implementation in the context of the EJB technology.

In Chapter 10, we decided to evolve the control object into a pair of servlets and have another control object focus on the internal interaction and business logic. That internal interaction and business logic is the domain of a specific type of Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) known as a session bean.

In this chapter, we start with a general discussion of EJB, and then look at how session beans are modeled in the Unified Modeling Language (UML). We later dig into the key technological aspects of session beans, and then finish with a discussion of where they fit into our evolving HomeDirect online banking example.