This course offers the Java programmer a grounding in the Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) architecture and the skills to develop EJBs effectively for enterprise development efforts. 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 are studied. 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 2.1 code.

The focus for the first module is on end-to-end connectivity. The module 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.

NOTE: Our JSP and Servlets courses are excellent companions to this course, and in fact the primary lab track for this module is an extension of the JSP module's labs.

Students then proceed to the second module, which begins with some 2.x-specific features, such as message-driven beans and the features of 2.x container-managed persistence. Two EJB applications are connected via JMS messaging, one sending messages with raw JMS code, and one using a message-driven bean to receive and handle those messages by updating an accounting database. Design implications of CMP are discussed, as are the new capabilities for EJB design: home and select methods.

Students then move on to 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. A short chapter on exception handling in EJB clarifies the standards for exception propagation and transaction control.

The next chapter introduces the new features in EJB 2.1 for implementing SOAP-based Web services, using the JAX-RPC mappings between Java and WSDL. Also new for 2.1, there is a short chapter on using the EJB timer service. The course concludes with a chapter on best-practice EJB development: optimizations, design patterns and implementation techniques.

The course software also includes an optional overlay of workspace and project files to support use of the Eclipse IDE in the classroom. (This requires that the instructor be experienced in use of Eclipse and able to walk students through basic tasks in the IDE.)

Java Training Learning Objectives

• 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 EJBs: Java source code and compilation, XML deployment descriptors, EJB compilation and deployment, and use by an application server.
• Understand the role of entity beans, session beans, and message-driven 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.
• 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.
• Use 2.x container-managed persistence and make intelligent design choices based on the practical implications of BMP and CMP features.
• Implement 2.x CMP entity bean relationships.
• Understand the EJB transaction architecture and apply transaction attributes to EJB systems, using both declarative and programmatic approaches.
• Understand the EJB security architecture and apply roles and authorization attributes to EJB systems -- again, using both declarative and programmatic techniques.
• Implement SOAP-based Web services using stateless session beans and JAX-RPC, and understand the relationship between JAXM and message-driven beans.
• Create and respond to EJB timers in bean code.
• Tune EJB application servers and EJB code for performance.
• Understand and apply design patterns that are important to common distributed systems and EJB systems in particular.

Hardware – minimal

500 MHz, 256 meg RAM, 500 meg disk space.

Hardware – recommended

1.5 GHz, 512 meg RAM, 1 gig disk space

Operating system

Tested on Windows XP Professional. Course software should be viable on all systems which support a J2SE 1.4 SDK.

Software

All free downloadable tools.