EJB Deployment

In this chapter, we've been examining JavaBeans and Enterprise JavaBeans. Both have their places in application development. We've also seen that EJB development is significantly more involved than simple JavaBean development. In fact, EJB development is somewhat more involved than we've seen to date. One area we haven't even touched on is EJB deployment. Deployment is the process of installing a bean or class into an execution environment. With simple JavaBeans, we need only have the bean available in the classpath for it to be deployed. With EJBs, which live in an App Server, deployment is move involved and requires that we generate all the container classes for the bean, package the bean into a jar file or other deployable unit, and then tell the App Server about the new deployable unit through a properties file or some other method. All this work is App Server dependent and would have taken several chapters to describe adequately. We invite the reader to delve deeper into this topic by installing any one of the excellent App Servers available online or by installing WebLogic Server v4.51 on the companion CD.