In this chapter, we gave an introduction to session beans, and explained how NetBeans can help us speed up session bean development.

We covered how EJBs in general, and session beans in particular, allow us to easily implement transaction strategies in our enterprise applications. We also covered how we can implement AOP with session beans via interceptors. Additionally, we discussed how session beans can have one of their methods invoked periodically by the EJB container by taking advantage of the EJB Timer service. Lastly, we covered how NetBeans can help speed up the implementation of the data access layer of our applications by generating session beans implementing the Data Access Object (DAO) design pattern automatically.