barcode font vb.net EJB as a component in Java

Creation DataMatrix in Java EJB as a component

In this book, when we talk about EJBs, we are referring to the server-side components that you can use to build parts of your application, such as the business logic or persistence code. Many of us tend to associate the term component with developing complex and heavyweight CORBA, Microsoft COM+ code. In the brave new world of EJB 3, a component is what it ought to be nothing more than a POJO with some special powers. More importantly, these powers remain invisible until they are needed and don t distract from the real purpose of the component. You will see this firsthand throughout this book, especially starting with chapter 2. The real idea behind a component is that it should effectively encapsulate application behavior. The users of a component aren t required to know its inner workings. All they need to know is what to pass in and what to expect back.

There are three types of EJB components: session beans, message-driven beans, and entities. Session beans and message-driven beans are used to implement business logic in an EJB application, and entities are used for persistence. Components can be reusable. For instance, suppose you re in charge of building a website for an online merchant that sells technology books. You implement a module to charge the credit card as part of a regular Java object. Your company does fairly well, and you move on to greener pastures. The company then decides to diversify and begins developing a website for selling CDs and DVDs. Since the deployment environment for the new site is different, it can t be located on the same server as your module. The person building the new site is forced to duplicate your credit card module in the new website because there s no easy way to access your module. If you had instead implemented the credit card charging module as an EJB component as shown in figure 1.1 (or as a web service), it would have been much easier for the new person to access it by simply making a call to it when she needed that functionality. She could have reused it without having to understand its implementation. Given that, building a reusable component requires careful planning because, across enterprise applications within an organization, very little of the business logic may be reusable. Therefore, you may not care about the reusability of EJB components, but EJB still has much to offer as a framework, as you ll discover in the next section.

Figure 1.1 EJB allows development of reusable components. For example, you can implement the credit card charging module as an EJB component that may be accessed by multiple applications.

As we mentioned, EJB components live in a container. Together, the components, or EJBs, and the container can be viewed as a framework that provides valuable services for enterprise application development. Although many people think EJBs are overkill for developing relatively simple web applications of moderate size, nothing could be further from the truth. When you build a house, you don t build everything from scratch. Instead, you buy materials or even the services of a contractor as you need it. It isn t too practical to build an enterprise application from scratch either. Most server-side applications have a lot in common, including churning business logic, managing application state, storing and retrieving information from a relational database, managing transactions, implementing security, performing asynchronous processing, integrating systems, and so on. As a framework, the EJB container provides these kinds of common functionality as out-of-the-box services so that your EJB components can use them in your applications without reinventing the wheel. For instance, let s say that when you built the credit card module in your web application, you wrote a lot of complex and error-prone code to manage transactions and security access control. You could have avoided that by using the declarative transaction and security services provided by the EJB container. These services, as well as many others you ll learn about in section 1.3, are available to the EJB components when they are deployed in the EJB container, as you can see in figure 1.2. This means writing high-quality, feature-rich applications much faster than you might think. The container provides the services to the EJB components in a rather elegant new way: metadata annotations are used to preconfigure the EJBs by specifying the type of services to add when the container deploys the EJBs. Java 5 introduced