.: John_Wiley_&_Sons,_Inc--Mastering_EJB,_2nd

Part 1 is a whirlwind introduction to EJB programming. Part 1 serves as a great overview for people in a hurry. While Part 1 is essential information to EJB newcomers, veterans will also find nuggets of useful knowledge as well. The following chapters are covered:

Chapter 1 is a tour of enterprise computing. We'll talk about components, distributed frameworks, and containers. We'll also introduce EJB and J2EE..

Chapter 2 moves onto the fundamentals of building an EJB system, including the tricky concept of request interception. We'll also look at the files that make up an enterprise bean.
Chapter 3 shows you how to put together a simple enterprise bean. We'll also learn how JNDI is used in EJB, and see how to call that bean from a client.

Part 2 devotes exclusive attention to programming with EJB. We'll see how to use the triad of beans: entity beans, session beans, and message-driven beans. We'll cover the basics of writing each type of bean, including an example as well as detailed life cycle diagrams.

Chapter 4 covers session beans. We'll look at the difference between stateful and stateless session beans, how to code a session bean, and what's going on behind-the-scenes with session beans.
Chapter 5 is a conceptual introduction to entity beans. We'll look at persistence concepts, what makes entity beans unique, and the files involved when building entity beans.
Chapter 6 covers bean-managed persistent (BMP) entity beans. We'll see how to program a BMP entity bean, and also look at what's happening behind the scenes with BMP.
Chapter 7 covers container-managed persitent (CMP) entity beans. We'll focus on the exciting new advances that EJB 2.0 has introduced, we'll learn how to program a CMP entity bean, and also look at what's happening behind the scenes with CMP.
Chapter 8 covers message-driven beans. We'll first review the Java Message Service (JMS), which is pre-requisite for learning message-driven beans. We'll then drive in and understand how to program with message driven beans.
Chapter 9 dicusses the EJB environment, along with services provided by the container. This includes security, environment properties, resource factory, references between beans, and handles.

Part 3 is the most exciting part of the book, and covers advanced EJB concepts. The following chapters are included:

Chapter 10 tackles transactions. Transactions are a crucial topic for anyone building an EJB deployment that involves state. We'll discuss transactions at a conceptual level, and how to apply them to EJB. We'll also learn about the Java Transaction API (JTA).
Chapter 11 covers relationships between entity beans. This is a critical concepts for anyone performing complex persistence. We'll understand the concepts of cardinality, directionality, referential integrity, and cascading deletes. We'll also see how to code relationships for both CMP and BMP entity beans.
Chapter 12 covers persistence best practices. You'll learn exciting concepts such as how to choose between session beans and entity beans, how to choose between BMP and CMP, and survey a collection of persistence best practices that we've assembled from our knowledge and experience.
Chapter 13 covers EJB design strategies to help your projects suceed. You'll learn about interesting topics such as hoe to choose between local interfaces and remote interfaces, how to choose between stateful and stateless systems, and how to choose between a 3 tier and 4-tier deployment.
Chapter 14 discusses clustering in large scale EJB systems. You'll learn about how clustering works behind the scenes, and learn few strategies for hoe containers might achieve clustering. This is a critical topic for anyone building a system that involves several machine working together.
Chapter 15 covers EJB project management. We'll talk about how to get your project started on the right foot. This includes how to choose wheter EJB is right for you, how to build a first pass of your system, and how to divide up your development team.
Chapter 16 coveres how to choose an EJB server. We'll describe our methodology for how an organization can compare and contrast different vendors' offering. We'll also list our set of criteria for what we would want in an EJB server.
Chapter 17 shows how to build a real world J2EE system using EJB components. We'll see how the EJB components should be used together in an enterprises, as well as how to connect them with clients such as Java Servlets and Java Server Pages (JSPs). We'll also demonstrate how to design an EJB object model using UML.