Enterprise JavaBeans, Third Edition

Chapter 5. The Client View

Developing the Cabin EJB and the TravelAgent EJB should have raised your confidence, but it also should have raised a lot of questions. So far, we have glossed over most of the details involved in developing, deploying, and accessing these enterprise 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 entity and session beans. Message-driven beans are not covered in this chapter—they are covered in detail in Chapter 13. The client, whether it is an application or another enterprise 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 enterprise beans regardless of their location on the network; the EJB client-side API is the set of interfaces and classes developers use on the client to interact with enterprise beans.

The best approach to this chapter is to read about several features of the client view and then follow the workbook examples to see those features in action. 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