Tutorial: Building Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB2)

This tutorial introduces you to the basics of building Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB2) with Workshop. Through the tutorial you'll build a very simple application that includes a session bean, an entity bean, and a Java Page Flow (as a client).

Note: This tutorial requests that you create a new workspace; if you already have a workspace open, this will restart the IDE. Before beginning, you might want to launch help in standalone mode to avoid an interruption the restart could cause, then locate this topic in the new browser. See Using Help in a Standalone Mode for more information.

Before You Begin

In general, this tutorial assumes you already know something about Enterprise JavaBeans and how they fit into applications built on J2EE. The Enterprise JavaBeans subject is large enough to fill entire books, so it's not described in detail here.

However, if you happen not to be familiar with Enterprise JavaBeans, this tutorial includes brief notes along the way about, for example, what entity and session beans are. But it's just enough to keep things moving along. For further reading, you might get started with the following:

• Sun Microsystems' Enterprise JavaBeans Technology home at the Sun web site
• WebLogic Server documentation on Programming WebLogic Enterprise JavaBeans on eDocs
• Workshop's documentation Developing Enterprise JavaBeans

Focus of this Tutorial

This tutorial introduces you to Enterprise JavaBeans development with Workshop. As you work through this tutorial, you will:

• Learn about three types of Workshop projects: the WebLogic EAR project, EJB project, and WebLogic web project.
• Create two types of Enterprise JavaBeans: an entity bean that stores visits to a web page and a session bean that models tracking and greeting visitors.
• Learn how to use EJBGen annotations to speed EJB development.
• Learn how to use an EJB control to ease client development.
• Test your EJBs using a web project as a test client.

Application Overview

The visitor tracking application you'll build with this tutorial includes the following components:

• A VisitBean entity bean that keeps track of visits to the test web page.
• A VisitTrackerBean session bean that greets visitors and checks the entity bean for the number of visits made to the web page.
• A VisitWebTest web project within which to build a page flow that will be a test client for VisitBean and VisitTrackerBean.
• A VisitTrackerBeanCtrl EJB control that will be the test page flow's means for calling methods of the VisitTrackerBean session bean.

Steps in this Tutorial

Step 1: Create a Workspace for Development

You'll use Workshop to create a workspace, adding projects that will contain your component code.

Step 2: Create the VisitBean Entity Bean

Here, you'll write code for the EJB in your application that will represent a visit.

Step 3: Create the VisitTrackerBean Session Bean

The session bean you'll create here will be responsible for counting visits.

Step 4: Create a Test Project

You'll use a page flow to test the EJBs you've built; here, you'll create a web project to get started.

Step 5: Write Test Source Code and Test the EJBs

At last, you'll try out your code using an EJB control in a page flow.