Summary

You've covered a lot of ground today. You've learned that there are stateless and stateful Session beans, and each has their own lifecycle. You've seen in detail how to specify a Session bean by defining its home and remote interfaces and how to implement a bean by providing corresponding implementations for the methods in the home and remote interfaces, as well as how to implement the lifecycle methods as defined in the javax.ejb.SessionBean interface.

You've also learned in detail how the deployment descriptor provides configuration information describing the bean's characteristics and dependencies to the EJB container.

Additionally, you've seen that those dependencies are logical dependencies that must be mapped by the EJB deployer role to the physical resources defined through vendor- specific auxiliary deployment descriptor.

Finally, you've learned about some common techniques, design patterns, and idioms that can simplify your coding and that represent best practice.