1.3. Our Vision

Enterprise JavaBeans technology is not an easy topic. Yet we believe EJB to be a significant offering in the enterprise computing arena. For the first time, there exists a specification that allows bean developers to write transactional, multi-user, scalable enterprise applications without being experts in transactions, multithreaded programming, security, or database programming. Pulling the enterprise system services out of the components and standardizing them within an application server has tremendous benefits. The most obvious benefit is that we leave the implementation of these system services to developers who are experts in enterprise issues. As the technology matures, the application servers will get better, and our enterprise applications will in turn run better.

Does this make EJB authoring simplistic? Not hardly. But it makes EJB authoring accessible and portable across multiple platforms. Our vision is to create a text with examples that teach, not just how to create an EJB, but how to design components that work best within the framework of a particular application. We strive to create examples that show you when to use an entity bean, not as an isolated entity bean example, but as a component within a whole, real-world application.

The industry is learning as pockets of developers here and there build on experiences. We learn what works and what doesn't. And from these battles with reality emerge design patterns that address common problems. So, along with our examples, we've also attempted to attack some of these problems. We show you how to apply commonly accepted design patterns to your enterprise designs (and why). Our hope is that you can take our examples and build your own solutions more quickly with an understanding of the design trade-offs that you'll make.

As you wind your way through these examples, we hope your EJB journey will be both exciting and rewarding.