The
workbench provides a specialized environment that you can use to develop and
test enterprise beans that conform to the distributed component architecture
defined in the Sun Microsystems Enterprise JavaBeans™ (EJB) specification. This
product supports the Enterprise JavaBeans 1.1, 2.0, and 2.1 specification
levels.
This product also supports extended Enterprise JavaBeans functionality provided by WebSphere® Application
Server, including extensions to the specification and security and other bindings.
The complete Enterprise JavaBeans specifications and descriptions
of the technology are available from the java.sun.com Web site.
If you are not familiar with enterprise beans or related EJB technology,
see EJB architecture for
a brief description of key EJB concepts.
The EJB development environment includes the following tools:
- The J2EE perspective
- Tools for importing existing EJB JAR files
- Tools for creating enterprise beans and access beans
- Tools for building data persistence into enterprise beans
- Tools for generating deployment code
- Tools for validating your enterprise beans for specification compliance
- J2EE perspective
- All of the EJB tools are accessible from the J2EE perspective. This perspective
provides a layout in which the most commonly used actions, views, and wizards
for J2EE and EJB development are easily accessible
- Creating enterprise beans
- The EJB tools help you create enterprise beans (either with or without
inheritance), such as session beans, container-managed persistence (CMP) entity
beans, bean-managed persistence (BMP) entity beans, or message-driven beans.
The EJB deployment descriptor editor helps you set deployment descriptor and
assembly properties for your enterprise beans.
You can also accomplish
complementary enterprise bean development activities, such as writing and
editing business logic, importing or exporting enterprise beans, and maintaining
both your enterprise bean source code and generated code using the built in Java™ development
tools, along with the team and version control capabilities of the workbench.
- Creating access beans
- You can also create access beans and add other attributes such as relationships.
Access beans are Java bean wrappers for enterprise beans, which are typically
used by client programs, such as Java ServerPages (JSP) files, servlets,
and sometimes even other enterprise beans.
- Building data persistence into enterprise beans
- The EJB mapping tools help you map entity enterprise beans to back-end
data stores, such as relational databases. There is support for top-down,
bottom-up, and meet-in-the-middle mapping development. You can also create
schemas and maps from existing EJB JAR files.
For more information about mapping, see Approaches
for mapping enterprise beans to database tables .
- Generating deployment code
- The EJB tools generate the deployment classes that allow your beans to
run on an EJB server. These tools mask the complexities normally associated
with creating deployment classes, such as generating RMI-over-IIOP stubs and
EJB container-specific deployment code.
The tools support session beans,
CMP entity beans, BMP entity beans, and message-driven beans (EJB 2.x only).
They also allow you to create relational database tables for CMP entity beans.
After the deployment code is generated, you can export your enterprise beans
to a JAR or EAR file for installation on an EJB server, such as the WebSphere Application
Server.
- Validating enterprise bean and access bean code
- The EJB tools automatically validate that your enterprise bean code is
consistent and that it conforms to the rules defined by the Enterprise JavaBeans specifications.
Code verification occurs whenever an enterprise bean or its properties are
changed. Errors and warnings are displayed in the Problems view of the workbench.
Files with errors also display error icons.
The EJB tools also automatically
validate that access beans are constructed correctly and that they are consistent
with their associated enterprise beans. Code validation occurs whenever you
create or edit access beans.