Enterprise JavaBeans, Second Edition

Chapter 5. The Client View

Developing the Cabin bean and the TravelAgent bean should have raised your confidence, but it should also have raised a lot of questions. So far, we have glossed over most of the details involved in developing, deploying, and accessing these beans. In this chapter and the ones that follow, we will slowly peel away the layers of the Enterprise JavaBeans onion to expose the details of EJB application development.

This chapter focuses specifically on the client’s view of an EJB system. The client, whether it is an application or another bean, doesn’t work directly with the beans in the EJB system. Instead, clients interact with a set of interfaces that provide access to beans and their business logic. These interfaces consist of the JNDI API and an EJB client-side API. JNDI allows us to find and access beans regardless of their location on the network; the EJB client-side API is the set of interfaces and classes that a developer uses on the client to interact with beans.

The best approach to this chapter is to read about a feature of the client view and then try to use that feature in the Cabin bean and TravelAgent bean client applications you worked with in Chapter 4. This will provide you with hands-on experience and a much clearer understanding of the concepts. Have fun, experiment, and you’ll be sure to understand the fundamentals.

Locating Beans with JNDI

In Chapter 4, the client application started by creating an InitialContext, which it then used ...