building your first enterprise javabean

An Introduction to Enterprise JavaBeansOverview : In this article we will learn what are Enterprise JavaBeans EJBs , what are it's different types and why to use EJBs in your applicatio

An Introduction to Enterprise JavaBeans

Overview :

In this article we will learn what are Enterprise JavaBeans ( EJBs ), what are it's different types and why to use EJBs in your application

What are EJBs ?

EJB stands for "Enterprise JavaBeans" which are distributed network aware components for developing secure, scalable, transactional and multi-user components in a J2EE environment

Above definition actually describes EJBs from functional point of view i.e what they do A more structural definition would be : "EJBs are collection of Java classes, interfaces and XML files adhering to given rules"

What do EJBs provide ?

In J2EE all the components run inside their own containers JSP,

Servlets and JavaBeans have their own web container Similarly EJBs run inside EJB container The container provides certain built-in

services to EJBs which the EJBs use to function The services that EJB container provides are :

The EJB container handles the pooling of EJB components If there are

no requests for a particular EJB then the container will probably

contain zero or one instance of that component in memory If need arises then it will increase component instances to satisfy all incoming requests Then again if number of requests decrease, container will decrease the component instances in the pool The best thing is that the client is absolutely unaware of this component pooling and the container handles all this for you

ii Resource Management :

The container is also responsible for maintaining database connection

pools It provides you a standard way of obtaining and returning

database connections The container also manages EJB environment references and references to other EJBs The container manages

following types of resources and makes them available to EJBs :

 JDBC 2.0 Data Sources

 JavaMail Sessions

 JMS Queues and Topics

 URL Resources

 Legacy Enterprise Systems via J2EE Connector Architecture

iii Transaction Management :

This is probably the single most important factor of all A transaction

is a single unit of work, composed of one or more steps If all the steps succeed then the transaction is committed otherwise it is rolled back There are different types of transactions and it is absolutely unimaginable to not to use transactions in today's business

environments We will learn more about transactions in a separate article

iv Security.

The EJB container provides it's own authentication and authorization control, allowing only specific clients to interact with the business process There is no need for you to create a security architecture of your own, you are provided with a built-in system, all you have to do

is to use it

v Persistence :

The container if desired can also maintain persistent data of our

application The container is then responsible for retrieving and saving the data for us while taking care of concurrent access from multiple clients and not corrupting the data

vi Handling of multiple clients.

The EJB container handles multiple clients of different types A JSP based thin client can interact with EJBs with same ease as that of GUI based thick client The container is smart enough to allow even non-Java clients like COM based applications to interact with the EJB

system Like before the EJB container handles it all for you

On the next page we learn about different types of EJBs

Types of EJBs :

There are three types of EJBs :

 Session Beans

 Entity Beans

 Message-Driven Beans

i Session Beans :

Session beans are the brain of our EJB based application Their

methods should decide what should or should not happen They

maintain the business logic The client directly interacts with them, they are of two types :

• Stateless Session Beans

They do not maintain state in class level variables They are thus fastest and most efficient of all Since they do not save their state in class level variables, they are called as

"Stateless"

• Stateful Session Beans

They do maintain state in class level variables and each client is provided a different and specific Stateful Session bean This is different from Stateless Session beans in which case the client can be provided any Stateless Session bean between requests since the Stateless Session beans haven't managed their state,

to the client, all of them are equal Due to this fact, Stateful Session beans are heavy beans, while Stateless Session beans are light and efficient

ii Entity Beans :

Entity beans represent data in an EJB system That data can reside in any data source including database Entity beans are also of two types :

 Container-Managed Persistence Entity Beans :

CMP bean's persistence is managed by the EJB container which

is responsible for saving and retrieving the data from the

underlying database for us CMP beans are easier to develop and work well with database access

 Bean-Managed Persistence Entity Beans :

BMP bean's persistence has to be managed by the EJB itself While it gives more control to the EJB developer to save and retrieve data, they are harder to build as more coding is

required One use of BMP beans would be to retrieve and save data from non-database data sources like XML files, JMS

resources etc

iii Message-Driven Beans :

They are new in EJB 2.0 specification and provide a mechanism for EJBs to respond to asynchronous JMS messages from different

sources Message-Driven beans and JMS have opened a new

paradigm for J2EE developers to create MOM ( Message Oriented

Middleware ) based applications We will learn more and more about this in separate articles on Stardeveloper.

Why to use EJBs ?

Developers have shown that good online applications can be created using JSP, Servlets and JavaBeans alone, without using EJBs This has raised the question that why should we use EJB? People who ask this question bring two important points in favor of not using EJBs :

• EJB Containers are expensive

• EJB based systems turn out to more complex to develop and maintain

I'll try to answer these questions now First of all the reason EJB

containers are expensive and their license fees turn out to be

thousands of dollars for a single instance of that container is simple, the whole business process depends on that EJB container

( application server ) to run Now if due to any reason there is a bug

or if the application server crashes all of a sudden then it is going to halt the business application, something which business people

wouldn't want to see happening even in dreams

Due to the dependency of the whole business process on these

application server, the application server vendors spend lot of money

on developing truly robust, secure and scalable application servers

which are fault-tolerant and work in clusters to provide fail-safe

operations They also provide certain additional features like load balancing to prevent one server from becoming bobbed down from load Current application servers also act as transactional processing monitors and work in the transactional system as heart in the body

Developers developing these application servers spend lot of time in making sure that if for some reason a server crashes, other servers should take over and not only take over but they should also be able

to maintain the system in a stable state and complete any

transactions which the failed application server might have been in the middle of committing or rolling back Now whether you agree or not, all of this takes lot of money and hard work on the part of

application server vendors

Now depending on the requirements of your organization or company you may or may not be requiring such great level of services If your organization's business processes span hundreds or thousands of different computers and servers then you will do yourself lot of good

if you get yourself good application servers, database applications and

best of all good J2EE developers But on the other hand if your

organization is really small one but still wants to use EJBs due to future scalability requirements then there are quite a few EJB

application servers from free and open source to the ones which are fast but still their license fees are quite low

Examples of application servers which are popular in large

organizations include BEA Web Logic, IBM Web Sphere and Oracle 9i Application Server While those for small organizations include JBoss

and Orion Application Server

Now to answer the second point that the EJB based system are

complex to develop and maintain I think people who raise this issue are probably those who have little experience in building and

maintaining EJB systems or are too scared to learn EJBs in the first place To be honest, after the availability of new and advanced

editors, architecting, building, deploying and maintaining EJB based J2EE systems is a fun

After the rising standard of UML to model business processes, it has become quite easy to architect business systems There are UML modeling tools available like Rational Rose and Together Control Center which not only allow you to architect J2EE systems using UML but also allow you to build and deploy complete J2EE applications using graphical user interface Their code editors are so nice that you only type the name of the object and it's methods and properties appear on the screen They also offer this kind of code editors for JSP pages as well

To sum up, you should use complete EJB based J2EE system when you need scalability and portability in your system Developing and using EJBs is fun and to me there is no reason why you should stay away from them The best anyone can do is to offer them to you at a cost you can afford, now it is up to you to make use of them

We learned that there are different system level services provided to

us built-in by the EJB container The EJBs make use of them We also learned that EJB's offer their services to different types of clients

including Java based JSP and GUI windowed applications to non-Java COM based applications.

We learned that there are 3 types of EJBs and each one of them is responsible for a specific task Session beans are responsible for maintaining logic, entity beans represent data and message-driven beans provide asynchronous event based response to JMS messages

In the end we had a pretty long discussion on what points people not

in favor of using EJBs raise and why we should use EJBs We also learned that there are wide variety of application servers from free and open source to the ones with high license fees are available There are accompanying IDEs for developing J2EE applications using wizards and graphical tools to aid in their quick development The industry standard of UML for modeling business processes alleviates the complexity of architecting J2EE based systems

Related Articles

1 Building your first Enterprise JavaBean

2 Reading and Parsing XML Files with Enterprise JavaBeans

3 EJB 2.1 Kick Start : Implementing a Solution Using EJB 2.1

Building your first Enterprise JavaBean

Overview :

In this tutorial we will learn how to create our first Enterprise

JavaBean We will then deploy this EJB on a production class, open source, and free EJB Server; JBoss JBoss is a really popular EJB Container and is used by quite a lot of organizations World wide We will thus also learn how to install and run JBoss Server The client for our EJB will be a JSP page running in a separate Tomcat Server

This tutorial consists of following topics :

 Installing and running JBoss Server

 Installing, configuring and running Tomcat Server

 Developing your first Session EJB

 Deploying this EJB on JBoss Server

 Creating the client JSP page

 Running the JSP page

 Summary

ι. Installing and Running JBoss Server :

You can download JBoss from JBoss web site Current stable version is 2.4.3 Download it from their web site Once you have downloaded it, unzip the JBoss zip file into some

directory e.g C:\JBoss The directory structure should be something like following :

C:\JBoss\bin>run

run.bat is a batch file which starts the JBoss Server Once JBoss

Server starts, you should see huge lines of text appearing on your command prompt screen These lines show that JBoss Server is

starting Once JBoss startup is complete you should see a message like following on your screen :

[Default] JBoss 2.4.3 Started in 0m:11s

Well done, you just installed and ran JBoss successfully on your

system for the first time To stop JBoss, simply press Ctrl + C on the command prompt and JBoss will stop, again after displaying huge lines of text

ii Installing, Configuring and Running Tomcat Server :

First download latest stable release of Tomcat Server from Tomcat web site Current latest stable release is 4.0.1 If you are on Windows platform then you have the luxury of downloading Tomcat in an

executable ( exe ) format So from the different types of Tomcat files available for download, select following :

jakarta-tomcat-4.0.1.exe

Once download is complete, double click this file to start the process

of Tomcat installation Installation is quite straight forward During setup if you are running Windows NT/2K/XP, you'll be asked if you want to install it as a service, select 'yes' if you know what as a

service is and how to start and stop it Basically allowing the Tomcat

to be installed a service means that you will be able to auto-start Tomcat when Windows starts and secondly Tomcat will run in the background and you won't have to keep one command prompt

window open while it is running Both of these features are great if you are using Tomcat on production machines During development I will suggest that you don't install Tomcat as a service

It will also ask you where you want it to be installed Give it any

location you want or simply allow it to be installed on the default location of C:\Program Files\Apache Tomcat 4.0

Before starting Tomcat, let's first configure it a bit on the next page

Configuring and Running Tomcat :

Create a new folder under the main C:\ drive and name it "Projects" Now create a new sub-folder in the C:\Projects folder and name it

"TomcatJBoss" The directory structure should look like following :C:\Projects

TomcatJBoss

Now open conf/Server.xml file from within the Tomcat directory

where you have installed it By default this location will be :

C:\Program Files\Apache Tomcat 4.0\conf\server.xml

Some where in the middle where you can see multiple <Context> tags, add following lines between other <Context> tags :

<! Tomcat JBoss Context >

<Context path="/jboss" docBase="C:\Projects\TomcatJBoss\" debug="0" reloadable="true" />

Now save Server.xml file Go to Start -> Programs -> Apache Tomcat 4.0 -> Start Tomcat, to start Tomcat Server If everything has been setup correctly, you should see following message on your command prompt

Starting service Tomcat-Standalone

Apache Tomcat/4.0.1

Note: Creating C:\Projects\TomcatJBoss folder and setting up new /jboss context in Tomcat is NOT required as far as accessing EJBs is concerned We are doing it only to put our JSP client in a separate folder so as not to intermingle it with your other projects

iii Developing your first Session EJB :

As we learned in "An Introduction to Enterprise JavaBeans" article, Session EJBs are responsible for maintaining logic in our J2EE

applications What we did not say in that article was that Session beans are also the simplest EJBs to develop So that's why our first EJB will be a Session bean

As you will see in a moment, every EJB class file has two

accompanying interfaces and one XML file The two interfaces are Remote and Home interfaces Remote interface is what the client gets

to work with, in other words Remote interface should contain the methods you want to expose to your clients Home interface is

actually EJB builder and should contain methods used to create

Remote interfaces for your EJB By default Home interface must

contain at least one create() method The actual implementation of these interfaces, our Session EJB class file remains hidden from the clients The XML file we talked about is named as "ejb-jar.xml" and is used to configure the EJBs during deployment So in essence our EJB, which we are going to create ( we will call it FirstEJB from now

onwards ) consists of following files :

com

stardeveloper

First.java will be the Remote interface we talked about

FirstHome.java is our Home interface and FirstEJB.java is the actual EJB class file The ejb-jar.xml deployment descriptor file goes in the META-INF folder

Create a new folder under the C:\Projects folder we had created

earlier, and name it as "EJB" Now create new sub-folder under

C:\Projects\EJB folder and name it as "FirstEJB" Create a new folder

"src" for Java source files in the "FirstEJB' folder The directory

structure should look like following :

Now create directory structure according to the package

com.stardeveloper.ejb.session in the "src" folder If you know how package structure is built, it shouldn't be a problem Anyhow, the final directory structure should like following :

Now create a new First.java source file in

com/stardeveloper/ejb/session folder Copy and paste following

code in it:

/* First.java */

package com.stardeveloper.ejb.session;

import javax.ejb.EJBObject;

import java rmi.RemoteException;

public interface First extends EJBObject {

public String getTime() throws RemoteException;

Note: Every Remote interface *must* always extend EJBObject

interface It is a requirement, not an option

public interface First extends EJBObject {

Now as I said on the last page, we have to declare methods in

Remote interface which we want to be called by the client ( which the client can access and call ) For simplicity, we will only declare a single method, getTime(); which will return a String object

containing current time

public String getTime() throws RemoteException;

Notice that there are no {} parenthesis with this method as it has been declared in an interace Remote interface method's must also throw RemoteException because EJBs are distributed components and during the call to an EJB, due to some network problem,

exceptional events can arise, so all Remote interface method's must declare that they can throw RemoteException in Remote interfaces