EJB 3.0 : Enterprise Java Beans

• What is EJB3.0?

Persistence is a higher-level abstraction above JDBC. The persistence layer maps objects to database storage so that they can be queried, loaded, updated, or removed without having to go through a verbose API such as JDBC. In older versions of EJB, persistence was part of the EJB platform. Starting with EJB 3.0, persistence has been spun off to its own specification, called the Java Persistence API.

The Java Persistence API defines a way to map regular, plain old Java objects (sometimes referred to as POJOs) to a database. These plain Java objects are called entity beans. Entity beans are like any other Java class, except that they have been mapped, using Java Persistence metadata, to a database. Therefore, they may be inserted and loaded from a database without the developer writing any JDBC connection code or reading from result sets. The Java Persistence API also defines a query language that has features that parallel those in SQL, but is tailored to work with Java objects rather than a raw relational schema.

In the EJB 2.1 specification, entity beans were very “heavyweight” and dependent on the application server and the entire Java EE runtime environment. In Java Persistence, entity beans are regular Java objects that are managed by a persistence service. Unlike their EJB 2.1 counterparts, entities in Java Persistence are not required to implement any special spec-defined interfaces or classes. Another weakness of the older specification was that it left individual vendors to decide how an object should be mapped to a particular database representation. This made EJB 2.1 entity beans mostly nonportable between vendors. The new Java Persistence specification defines a complete object to relational mapping (ORM) so that entity beans can be ported easily from vendor to vendor. Furthermore, because entity beans are now plain Java objects, they are not just portable between application servers; they can be used in regular Java applications outside of an application server and can even be used to transfer data between a client and a server. This makes designs simpler and more compact.

The Entity Bean

Entity beans in the Java Persistence 1.0 specification are available only as plain old Java objects (POJOs), and are mapped to tables in a relational database. Unlike other EJB types, entities can be allocated, serialized, and sent across the network like any other POJO.

Message-Driven Beans

Enterprise JavaBeans 2.0 introduced a new kind of component, called a message-driven bean, which is a kind of standard JMS bean. It can receive and send asynchronous JMS messages, and can easily interact with other EJBs.

Java Message Service

Each MOM vendor implements its own networking protocols, routing, and administration facilities, but the basic semantics of the developer API provided by different MOMs are the same. It’s this similarity in APIs that makes the Java Message Service (JMS) possible.

JMS is a vendor-agnostic Java API that can be used with many different MOM vendors. JMS is very similar to JDBC in that an application developer can reuse the same API to access many different systems. If a vendor provides a compliant service provider for JMS, the JMS API can be used to send messages to and receive messages from that vendor. For example, you can use the same JMS API to send messages with Progress’s SonicMQ as with IBM’s MQSeries.

Web Services

Web services represent the latest wave in distributed computing. Although the term web services is bandied about quite a bit, arriving at a concrete definition is difficult because web services is, at the highest level, not specific to any particular technology or platform.

SOAP 1.1

Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) is an XML grammar, developed by Microsoft, IBM, and others, that is currently under the auspices of the W3C. It’s an application protocol used in both RPC and asynchronous messaging. SOAP is very flexible and extensible and, unlike its predecessors (DCE RPC, CORBA IIOP, Java RMI-JRMP, and DCOM), it’s been endorsed and adopted by just about every major vendor. (If you’re not familiar with XML, see Java and XML or XML in a Nutshell, both from O’Reilly.)

WSDL 1.1

The Web Service Description Language (WSDL) is another XML grammar, developed by Microsoft and IBM under the auspices of the W3C. It is an XML-based Interface Definition Language (IDL) that can be used to describe web services, including the kind of message format expected, the Internet protocol used, and the Internet address of the web service.

EJB 3.0 allows enterprise beans to be exposed as web services so that their methods can be invoked by other J2EE applications as well as applications written in other programming languages on a variety of platforms. Web services in EJB 3.0 support both RPC-style and document-style messaging. Support for web services is based on a web service API: JAX-WS.

Java Persistence also makes it fairly easy for developers to write objects that can be persisted to a relational database. Writing a persistent entity bean can be as easy as using a few strategically placed annotations with little to no information about the database. Although it is easy to prototype entity beans, the specification is rich enough to provide facilities for more complex database mappings.