Preface

This guide gets you started building Enterprise JavaBeans for Oracle Application Server Containers for J2EE (OC4J). It includes code examples to help you develop your application.

Who Should Read This Guide?

Anyone developing Enterprise JavaBeans for OC4J will benefit from reading this guide. Written especially for programmers, it will also be of value to architects, systems analysts, project managers, and others interested in EJB applications. To use this guide effectively, you must have a working knowledge of J2EE.

Documentation Accessibility

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http://www.oracle.com/accessibility/

Accessibility of Code Examples in Documentation

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Prerequisite Reading

Before consulting this Guide, you should read the following:

• Any J2EE book that enables you to understand the basics of J2EE programming.

• The Oracle Application Server Containers for J2EE User's Guide. This guide helps you to understand the minimum requirements for a J2EE application in the OC4J environment.

• The Sun Microsystems EJB 2.0 specification as a supplement to this guide. This guide assumes that you already have a base understanding of the EJB 2.0 specification details.

Suggested Reading

Books

• Professional Java Server Programming, J2EE Edition, Wrox Press Ltd, 2000.

• Mastering Enterprise JavaBeans and the Java2 Platform Enterprise Edition, by Ed Roman. Wily Computer Publishing, 1999.

• Designing Enterprise Applications with the Java2 Platform, Enterprise Edition, Addison-Wesley, 2000.

• Core Java by Cornell & Horstmann, second edition, Volume II (Prentice-Hall, 1997) demonstrates several Java concepts relevant to EJBs.

• The Developer's Guide to Understanding Enterprise JavaBeans, an overview of EJBs, is available at http://www.Nova-Labs.com.

Online Sources

There are many useful online sources of information about Java. For example, you can view or download guides and tutorials from the Sun Microsystems home page on the Web:

http://www.sun.com

The current 2.0 EJB specification is available at:

http://java.sun.com/products/ejb/docs.html

Another popular Java Web site is:

http://www.gamelan.com

For Java API documentation, see:

http://www.javasoft.com

How This Guide Is Organized

This guide consists of the following:

• Chapter 1, "How Do Applications Use EJBs?", presents a brief overview of EJBs.

• Chapter 2, "How to Access EJBs", discusses how to access an EJB from a servlet within the application server or from outside the application server—either from an EJB within another application server or from a local client. .

• Chapter 3, "Implementing Session Beans", discusses how to begin developing J2EE applications.

• Chapter 4, "CMP Entity Beans", discusses a CMP entity bean and advanced issues connected with CMP entity beans.

• Chapter 5, "Entity Beans", discusses entity beans.

• Chapter 6, "Entity Relationship Mapping", discusses container-managed relationships (CMR) within the entity bean for OC4J.

• Chapter 7, "EJB Query Language", provides an overview and examples of setting up query methods that use EJB QL.

• Chapter 8, "BMP Entity Beans", discusses a BMP entity bean.

• Chapter 9, "Message-Driven Beans", discusses an MDB entity bean.

• Chapter 10, "Understanding Environment, Deployment, and Packaging", discusses how to set up your development environment, as well as packaging and deploying your applications.

• Chapter 11, "Configuring EJB Application Security", discusses EJB application security.

• Chapter 12, "EJB Clustering", discusses how to cluster EJBs across OC4J nodes.

• Appendix A, "XML Reference for ORION-EJB-JAR.XML" describes the OC4J-specific deployment descriptor.

• Appendix B, "Third Party Licenses", contains the third party software licenses for this product.

Conventions

The following conventions are used in this manual: