Preface

EJB (Enterprise JavaBeans) 3.0 entity beans is a commonly used database persistence technology. EJB 3.0 has simplified the development of EJBs with an annotations-based API that does not require remote/local interfaces, home/local home interfaces, or deployment descriptors. Developing entity EJBs requires an application server and a relational database, and optionally a Java EE IDE to simplify the process of development. The objective of the JSR-000220 Enterprise JavaBeans 3.0 specification (http://jcp.org/aboutJava/communityprocess/final/jsr220/index.html) is to improve the EJB architecture by reducing its complexity from the developer's point of view. EJB 3.0 has introduced some new features, which include support for metadata annotations, default values for configuration, simplified access to environment variables, simplified session and entity beans, interceptors, enhanced support for checked exceptions, and elimination of callback interfaces.

A number of books are available on EJB 3.0, but none cover EJB 3.0 on the Oracle Fusion Middleware (11g) platform. Most of the EJB 3.0 books are GlassFish server based, which has only 10percent of the application server market. Welcome to EJB 3.0 Database Persistence with Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g, a book that will teach you how to leverage EJB 3.0 persistence on Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g. Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g includes many components such as the SOA/BPM Suite, WebCenter, and Oracle Identity Management. All of these components run on Oracle Weblogic Server 11g. The main development tool (IDE) for Oracle Fusion Middleware is Oracle JDeveloper. In respect of EJB 3.0, JDeveloper provides wizard support to reverse engineer database tables as EJB 3.0 entity beans. JDeveloper 11g also provides a wizard for creating session beans. The JPA persistence provider used in JDeveloper 11g is the EclipseLink persistence provider. JDeveloper comes with its own embedded/integrated Weblogic Server instance, which makes it very easy to develop and test within the one environment. We shall be using the embedded WebLogic Server 11g in some of the chapters and the standalone WebLogic Server in others.

The objective of the book is to discuss the support of EJB 3.0 database persistence in Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g. While JDeveloper is the main Java IDE used in the book, one of the chapters leverages the Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse. The book covers all aspects of EJB 3.0 database persistence including: