The main purpose of this book is to teach you how to use the Enterprise JavaBeans components and APIs as opposed to design and architecture of enterprise systems. Although this chapter has focused on design considerations and alternatives to EJB,it is not a comprehensive or complete treatment of architecture or design—that requires an entire book dedicated to that subject.

There are a number of books that we feel complement this chapter and will extend your understanding of design and architecture of EJB and J2EE systems. Chief among them is Core J2EE Patterns: Best Practices and Design Strategies, Second Edition by Deepak Alur, et al. (Addison-Wesley), and Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture by Martin Fowler (Addison-Wesley). These books are excellent resources for a more in-depth understanding of design and architecture issues. That said, these books provide only shallow or no discussion of the EJB APIs, life cycles, deployment and components. To master those topics, critical during development, you’ll need this book.