Course Description

Enterprise Java Beans Development

This course provides the Java developer with deep understanding of the Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) architecture, and the skills necessary to develop EJBs effectively. The course examines the EJB's position at the heart of the Java Enterprise platform and the use of EJB application servers as the backbone of large-scale distributed systems. We consider the advantages of the application server architecture - transaction control, security, persistence, scalability through pooling and clustering - and study the development process for entity and session beans in depth. The J2EE reference implementation is used for all demo and lab work, and we emphasize portable EJB 1.2 code.

The focus for this course is on end-to-end connectivity. The course follows a path roughly from the data layer to the presentation layer, so we look at entity beans first, and work demos and exercises in both Bean-Managed and Container-Managed Persistent Beans. Then the EJB session layer is considered, and both stateless and stateful session beans are developed. As part of the lab work, these are hooked to provided JSPs to illustrate the complete system and typical architecture.

Once the basics of designing, developing and deploying EJBs are understood, we study declarative and programmatic transaction control. The EJB security architecture is also considered, and a simple role-based authorization design applied to the course's main lab project. The course concludes with a chapter on best-practice EJB development: optimizations, design patterns and implementation techniques.

This course touches on Java Server Page (JSP) technology. With JSP you can separate the presentation from the business logic. JSP is both very simple to use and also very powerful in the way it can leverage other Java technologies, such as JavaBeans and JDBC.

• Understand the role of Enterprise JavaBeans in enterprise-level systems development, and its relationship to other J2EE technologies such as JSP, servlets, JMS, CORBA, and XML.
• Understand the EJB architecture: the role of the EJB container in mediating contact between the client and the bean, transaction control, authorization control, and the importance of object pooling.
• Understand the development cycle for beans: Java source code and compilation, XML deployment descriptors, EJB compilation and deployment, and use by an application server.
• Understand the role of entity beans, their lifecycle and interactions with the container.
• Develop and test BMP and CMP entity beans and understand the importance of each of the entity-bean methods in assisting the container in pooling.
• Understand the role of session beans, their lifecycle and interactions with the container.
• Develop and test stateless and stateful session beans and effectively manage passivation/activation cycles.
• Use the bean context interfaces to assist with persistence code and to correctly establish bean-to-bean communication.
• Understand the EJB transaction architecture and apply transaction attributes to EJB systems.
• Understand the EJB security architecture and apply roles and authorization attributes to EJB systems.
• Tune EJB application servers and EJB code for performance.
• Understand and apply design patterns that are important to common distributed systems and EJB systems particular