Question

I am totally a newbie in EJB, basically at present my focus is not to master EJB because my university exams are near and i have to focus on them

But my university syllabus has 2 chapters on EJB (you can say a very very brief overview of EJB 2.0) for that purpose i want to have an overview of EJB

I have purchased the Head First EJB which is for EJB 2.0

I have the following questions, they might be silly because i am not too good in Java but i trying my best to be good.

(1) Head first EJB says “If you don’t have an EJB 2.0 compliant server, go to java.sun.com and download J2EE 1.3”
so whats an EJB 2.0 compliant server??

downlaod J2EE 1.3 do i have to do this when i have the Java 7 (jdk 1.7.0) installed

(2)Reference Implementation server? what’s this.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

1. Java EE applications run on top of a Java Application Server like Apache Tomcat or Glassfish. An EJB compliant server is one that supports the use of EJB’s. Tomcat is not EJB compliant, glassfish is.

Java 7 jdk is only Java SE (Standard Edition). Java EE (Enterprise Edition) is build on top of Java SE. To develop Java EE applications you need a Java SE jdk which you have, the Java EE sdk and a Java Application server. Best way to get started is to download the Netbeans IDE. It includes all you need (make sure you download the Java EE version). On that site are also several tutorials. As JB Nizet mentioned EJB2.0 is old tech it’s from Java EE 1.3 (2001) while the current version is Java EE 1.6 (2009) often just called Java EE 6. With 6 Java EE has become much more lightweight, less reliant on XML and more on Annotations which makes development much easier. EJB2.0 should still work but I have never tried it.

1. In conjunction with all the Java standards an application server is implemented demonstrating those standards.

BTW Sun and thus Java has been acquired by Oracle so links to sun.com may not work or redirect you to Oracle.