Chapter 3. Building business logic with session beans

At the heart of any enterprise application lies its business logic. In an ideal world, application developers should only be concerned with defining and implementing the business logic, while concerns like presentation, persistence, or integration should largely be window dressing. From this perspective, session beans are the most important part of the EJB technology because their purpose in life is to model high-level business processes.

If you think of a business system as a horse-drawn chariot with a driver carrying the Greco-Roman champion to battle, session beans are the driver. Session beans utilize data and system resources (the chariot and the horses) to implement the goals of the user (the champion) using business logic (the skills and judgment of the driver). For this and other reasons, sessions beans, particularly stateless session beans, have been popular, even despite the problems of EJB 2. EJB 3 makes this vital bean type a lot easier to use.

3.1. Getting to know session beans

3.2. Stateless session beans

3.3. Stateful session beans

3.4. Session bean clients

3.5. Performance considerations for stateful beans

3.6. Session bean best practices

3.7. Summary