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 Java™ bean
(EJB) specification. This product supports the Enterprise Java beans 1.1, 2.0, 2.1, and 3.0 specification
levels.
This product also supports extended Enterprise Java bean functionality provided by WebSphere® Application Server,
including extensions to the specification and security and other bindings.
The complete Enterprise Java bean
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 Java EE 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
- Java EE perspective
- All the EJB tools are accessible from the Java EE perspective. This perspective provides
a layout in which the most commonly used actions, views, and wizards
for Java EE 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.
- Maintaining enterprise bean source code and generated code using
both team and version control capabilities of the workbench, along
with built-in Java development
tools.
- 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 Java bean 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.