Appendix D. New Features in EJB 1.1

In December 1999, Sun Microsystems released the final specification of Enterprise JavaBeans 1.1. Enterprise JavaBeans 1.1 is, in many ways, a point release with corrections and clarifications over EJB 1.0 that allows vendors and bean developers to create more portable beans. This appendix summarizes the most important and visible modifications to the specification made in EJB 1.1.

The biggest changes between EJB 1.0 and EJB 1.1 include mandating entity bean support, the adoption of XML deployment descriptors, the creation of a default JNDI context, and changes to security.

D.1. Entity Beans

EJB 1.1 mandates support for the [a-z]ntity bean type. In EJB 1.0, entity bean support is optional, which means vendors can support them in whole, in part, or not at all. Most EJB server vendors chose to support entity beans in some way; for these vendors, the transition to full support shouldn't be difficult. For most EJB developers, the required support for entity beans is welcomed because it provides a more stable platform for portable beans.

The entity bean type itself has undergone some changes. The bean-managed transaction option has been removed from entity beans. This option is difficult to use because it requires explicit transactional control by the developer. Removing it from entity beans simplifies the EJB architecture. Stateful session beans, however, still retain the option of managing their own transactions.

Another welcome change is the expansion of valid return types from the find methods for entity beans. In EJB 1.0, find methods can return a single entity or a collection of entities. Find methods that return a single entity return the entity's remote interface type; entities that return a collection use java.util.Enumeration. In EJB 1.1, a new return type has been added, java.util.Collection. This addition provides both the vendors and developers with more flexibility in how the find methods are implemented and used.

A seemingly minor change to the return value of ejbCreate() may turn out to be a headache when upgrading systems from EJB 1.0 to the EJB 1.1 specification. Because the ejbCreate() method works differently in bean-managed and container-managed beans, EJB 1.0 specified different return values: bean-managed entities return the unique identity of the bean, the primary key; container-managed entities return void. The following code shows the different method signatures used for container-managed and bean-managed ejbCreate() methods in EJB 1.0:

// container-managed entity, EJB 1.0
    public class AccountCMP implements javax.ejb.EntityBean {
    public int id;
    public double balance;

    public void ejbCreate(int myID) {
        id = myID;
    }
    // more bean code follows
}

// bean-managed entity, EJB 1.0
    public class AccountBMP implements javax.ejb.EntityBean {
    public int id;
    public double balance;

    public AccountPK ejbCreate(int myID) {
        id = myID;
        // do a database insert using JDBC
        AccountPK pk = new AccountPK(myID);
        return pk;
    }
    // more bean code follows
}

The EJB 1.1 specification changes this so that both bean-managed and container-managed entities have to return the primary key type from the ejbCreate() methods. However, container-managed beans are required to return null instead of a primary key object. This seemingly bizarre change was made to accommodate EJB vendors who want to support container-managed beans by extending them with generated bean-managed classes. The generated subclasses override the ejbCreate() methods to manually insert a record into the database. In EJB 1.0, the ejbCreate() methods in bean-managed and container-managed entities have different return values, so extending the class and overriding the ejbCreate() methods doesn't work. By specifying that the ejbCreate() methods must always return the primary key class, container-managed beans can be extended to create bean-managed beans. Unfortunately, this change breaks forward compatibility with EJB 1.0 container-managed beans, forcing bean developers to make changes to their existing code if they want to transition to the EJB 1.1 specification.

The EJB 1.1 specification also contains some other changes regarding the primary key class. For bean-managed persistence, EJB 1.1 states that the primary key class can be any valid Java RMI-IIOP type--a clear indication that IIOP will be the standard distributed object protocol for EJB in a future version of the specification. In addition, the new specification requires the primary key class to implement the Object.equals() and Object.hashCode() methods to ensure that these methods evaluate properly when comparing keys and storing them in a java.util.Hashtable. The most significant change regarding primary keys is the option to defer their definition until deployment time. In other words, the primary key for an entity bean doesn't have to be defined by the developer, but can be left to the deployer. This is a significant departure from the previous specification, which required the bean developer to define the primary keys. By deferring the definition until deployment, persistence mapping becomes more flexible, allowing beans to become more portable. Although this is a convenient option, it's likely that most bean developers will continue to specify the primary class when they develop the bean.

Finally, a change in the EJB 1.1 specification allows entity bean references to be container-managed fields. In container-managed persistence, the container manages persistence automatically, so it must be told at deployment time which fields are persistent and how to map them to the database. In EJB 1.0, container-managed fields are limited to primitives and java.io.Serializable types. Limiting the container-managed fields to these simple types makes it more difficult to maintain persistent relationships to other entity beans; entity beans are always referenced using their java.rmi.Remote interface type, which is neither a primitive nor Serializable. EJB 1.1 specifies that container-managed fields can include references to other entity beans, which makes it much easier for the bean developer to model associations and aggregations of beans. How the container persists the relationships is not specified, but it's likely that options for converting the reference to a primary key will be provided at deployment time.

Appendix D. New Features in EJB 1.1

Contents:

D.1. Entity Beans