In Quest of Enterprise
JavaBeans
By
Lincoln Stein
There are some things about Web technology that make immediate sense to me,
and others that don't. XML, the eXtensible Markup Language, falls into the
former class. When I first read about it, its purpose seemed clear and its
importance obvious. I suppose this is because so much of what I do professionally
involves moving data from one incompatible format to another, and I've wished
many times for a simple, standard syntax for moving objects out of databases
and back in again.
On the other hand, Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) are in the latter class. Ever
since I first encountered the term about six months ago, I've been trying
to wrap my mind around the EJB concept, but somehow it keeps eluding me. Perhaps
unsurprisingly, I've also been having difficulty understanding EJB's raison
d'etre, the application server, and this despite an entire issue of Web
Techniques devoted to the topic (February 1999).
On the assumption that if I'm having trouble understanding EJB, then others
are as well, I decided to look into the issue.
