Enterprise Java Beans (EJB) Interview Questions And Answers
The EJB specification is one of several Java APIs in the Java Platform, Enterprise Edition. EJB is a server-side model that encapsulates the business logic of an application. The EJB specification was originally developed in 1997 by IBM and later adopted by Sun Microsystems (EJB 1.0 and 1.1) and enhanced under the Java Community Process as JSR 19 (EJB 2.0), JSR 153 (EJB 2.1) and JSR 220 (EJB 3.0).
The EJB specification intends to provide a standard way to implement the back-end 'business' code typically found in enterprise applications (as opposed to 'front-end' user-interface code). Such code was frequently found to reproduce the same types of problems, and it was found that solutions to these problems are often repeatedly re-implemented by programmers. Enterprise JavaBeans were intended to handle such common concerns as persistence, transactional integrity, and security in a standard way, leaving programmers free to concentrate on the particular problem at hand.
41. What is Entity Bean?
The entity bean is used to represent data in the database. It provides an object-oriented interface to data that would normally be accessed by the JDBC or some other back-end API. More than that, entity beans provide a component model that allows bean developers to focus their attention on the business logic of the bean, while the container takes care of managing persistence,transactions, and access control.
There are two basic kinds of entity beans: container-managed ersistence (CMP) andbean-managed persistence (BMP).
Container-managed persistence beans are the simplest for the bean developer to create and the most difficult for the EJB server to support. This is because all the logic for synchronizing the bean's state with the database is handled automatically by the container. This means that the bean developer doesn't need to write any data access logic, while the EJB server is
supposed to take care of all the persistence needs automatically. With CMP, the container manages the persistence of the entity bean. Vendor tools are used to map the entity fields to the database and absolutely no database access code is written in the bean class.
The bean-managed persistence (BMP) enterprise bean manages synchronizing its state with the database as directed by the container. The bean uses a database API to read and write its fields to the database, but the container tells it when to do each synchronization operation and manages the transactions for the bean automatically. Bean-managed persistence gives the bean developer the flexibility to perform persistence operations that are too complicated for the container or to use a data source that is not supported by the container.
42. What is Session Bean?
A session bean is a non-persistent object that implements some business logic running on the server. One way to think of a session object is as a logical extension of the client program that runs on the server.
Session beans are used to manage the interactions of entity and other session beans,access resources, and generally perform tasks on behalf of the client.
There are two basic kinds of session bean: stateless and stateful.
Stateless session beans are made up of business methods that behave like procedures; they operate only on the arguments passed to them when they are invoked. Stateless beans are called stateless because they are transient; they do not maintain business state between method invocations.Each invocation of a stateless business method is independent from previous invocations. Because stateless session beans are stateless, they are easier for the EJB container to manage, so they tend to process requests faster and use less resources.
Stateful session beans encapsulate business logic and state specific to a client. Stateful beans are called "stateful" because they do maintain business state between method invocations, held in memory and not persistent. Unlike stateless session beans, clients do not share stateful beans. When a client creates a stateful bean, that bean instance is dedicated to service only that client. This makes it possible to maintain conversational state, which is business state that can be shared by methods in the same stateful bean.
43. What is software architecture of EJB?
Session and Entity EJBs consist of 4 and 5 parts respetively:
1. A remote interface (a client interacts with it),
2. A home interface (used for creating objects and for declaring business methods),
3. A bean object (an object, which actually performs business logic and EJB-specific operations).
4. A deployment descriptor (an XML file containing all information required for maintaining the EJB) or a set of deployment descriptors (if you are using some container-specific features).
5.A Primary Key classA: is only Entity bean specific.
44. What is the advantage of putting an Entity Bean instance from the ?Ready State? to ?Pooled state??
The idea of the ?Pooled State? is to allow a container to maintain a pool of entity beans that has been created, but has not been yet ?synchronized? or assigned to an EJBObject. This mean that the instances do represent entity beans, but they can be used only for serving Home methods (create or findBy), since those methods do not relay on the specific values of the bean. All these instances are, in fact, exactly the same, so, they do not have meaningful state. Jon Thorarinsson has also added: It can be looked at it this way: If no client is using an entity bean of a particular type there is no need for cachig it (the data is persisted in the database). Therefore, in such cases, the container will, after some time, move the entity bean from the ?Ready State? to the ?Pooled state? to save memory. Then, to save additional memory, the container may begin moving entity beans from the ?Pooled State? to the ?Does Not Exist State?, because even though the bean?s cache has been cleared, the bean still takes up some memory just being in the ?Pooled State?.
45. What is the advantage of using Entity bean for database operations, over directly using JDBC API to do database operations? When would I use one over the other?
Entity Beans actually represents the data in a database. It is not that Entity Beans replaces JDBC API. There are two types of Entity Beans Container Managed and Bean Mananged. In Container Managed Entity BeanA: Whenever the instance of the bean is created the container automatically retrieves the data from the DB/Persistance storage and assigns to the object variables in bean for user to manipulate or use them. For this the developer needs to map the fields in the database to the variables in deployment descriptor files (which varies for each vendor).
In the Bean Managed Entity BeanA: The developer has to specifically make connection, retrive values, assign them to the objects in the ejbLoad() which will be called by the container when it instatiates a bean object. Similarly in the ejbStore() the container saves the object values back the the persistance storage. ejbLoad and ejbStore are callback methods and can be only invoked by the container. Apart from this, when you use Entity beans you dont need to worry about database transaction handling, database connection pooling etc. which are taken care by the ejb container. But in case of JDBC you have to explicitly do the above features. what suresh told is exactly perfect. ofcourse, this comes under the database transations, but i want to add this. the great thing about the entity beans of container managed, whenever the connection is failed during the transaction processing, the database consistancy is mantained automatically. the container writes the data stored at persistant storage of the entity beans to the database again to provide the database consistancy. where as in jdbc api, we, developers has to do manually.
46. What is the default transaction attribute for an EJB?
There is no default transaction attribute for an EJB. Section 11.5 of EJB v1.1 spec says that the deployer must specify a value for the transaction attribute for those methods having container managed transaction. In WebLogic, the default transaction attribute for EJB is SUPPORTS.
47. What is the difference between a ?Coarse Grained? Entity Bean and a ?Fine Grained? Entity Bean?
A ?fine grained? entity bean is pretty much directly mapped to one relational table, in third normal form. A ?coarse grained? entity bean is larger and more complex, either because its attributes include values or lists from other tables, or because it ?owns? one or more sets of dependent objects. Note that the coarse grained bean might be mapped to a single table or flat file, but that single table is going to be pretty ugly, with data copied from other tables, repeated field groups, columns that are dependent on non-key fields, etc. Fine grained entities are generally considered a liability in large systems because they will tend to increase the load on several of the EJB server?s subsystems (there will be more objects exported through the distribution layer, more objects participating in transactions, more skeletons in memory, more EJB Objects in memory, etc.)
48. What is the difference between a Server, a Container, and a Connector?
An EJB server is an application, usually a product such as BEA WebLogic, that provides (or should provide) for concurrent client connections and manages system resources such as threads, processes, memory, database connections, network connections, etc. An EJB container runs inside (or within) an EJB server, and provides deployed EJB beans with transaction and security management, etc. The EJB container insulates an EJB bean from the specifics of an underlying EJB server by providing a simple, standard API between the EJB bean and its container. A Connector provides the ability for any Enterprise Information System (EIS) to plug into any EJB server which supports the Connector architecture. See Sun?s J2EE Connectors for more in-depth information on Connectors.
49. What is the difference between Context, InitialContext and Session Context? How they are used?
javax.naming.Context is an interface that provides methods for binding a name to an object. It's much like the RMI Naming.bind() method.
javax.naming.InitialContext is a Context and provides implementation for methods available in the Context interface.
50. What is the difference between Message Driven Beans and Stateless Session beans?
In several ways, the dynamic creation and allocation of message-driven bean instances mimics the behavior of stateless session EJB instances, which exist only for the duration of a particular method call. However, message-driven beans are different from stateless session EJBs (and other types of EJBs) in several significant ways:
Message-driven beans process multiple JMS messages asynchronously, rather than processing a serialized sequence of method calls.
Message-driven beans have no home or remote interface, and therefore cannot be directly accessed by internal or external clients. Clients interact with message-driven beans only indirectly, by sending a message to a JMS Queue or ic.
Note: Only the container directly interacts with a message-driven bean by creating bean instances and passing JMS messages to those instances as necessary.
The Container maintains the entire lifecycle of a message-driven bean; instances cannot be created or removed as a result of client requests or other API calls.
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