Learn EJB 3.0 really fast

Question

Hello everybody,

I am in an urgent need to put myself up to speed with EJB 3.0, like in a couple of days or so. Please don't ask...

I have some years behind me as a programmer and worked with different technologies: RMI, JNDI, EJB 1, EJB 2, Hibernate etc so I'm not a stranger to all of this. But that was sooooooome time ago.

I need a tutorial (not your friendly 800 pages book) that will introduce me into all the features of EJB 3 as fast as possible maybe provide like a features reference or something.

Does something like this exist?

Thank you!

Answer 1

Head First EJB. Head First books are easy reads that you will fly through, and they use a multitude of techniques to make sure you're actually learning what you read.

EDIT: I thought they had released the second edition with EJB 3 by now, but it appears that the book still only covers EJB 2! :(

Answer 2

I'd suggest Pro EJB 3!

Answer 3

I think to get most of it you should goolge "ejb 2.1 3.0 migration" and read articles like Migrating EJB 2.x applications to EJB 3.0:

First thing to learn is that in EJB 3.0 annotations are mostly prefered over deployment descriptors. If you're already familiar with hibernate you will probably have not problems with JPA.

I would recommend going through a JEE tutorials demo application, and download the reference documentation to lookup details.

Answer 4

If you have only a couple of days to spare, I would suggest starting off with the OpenEJB tutorial to get your hands dirty. A lot has changed in EJB 3 if you compare it to EJB 2 - entity beans are no longer managed by the EJB container and are instead called entities (there is a separate spec - JPA for this), and there is no longer for the verbose XML descriptors for ejb-jar.xml etc.

It would also be better to have one of the books suggested in the other answers. Avoid the Pro series from APress until you're mastered the basics; instead refer to the From Novice to Professional Series whenever in need of a book for beginners.

Hope this helps.

EDIT: I'd like to emphasize that most (if not all) of the annotations introduced in the EJB 3 specification are covered in the OpenEJB tutorial.

Answer 5

I'd suggest you to use fast environment for testing purposes. Avoiding several hours worth of "fix, recompile, redeploy, fail, repeat" cycles.

embeddable and lightweight EJB Container System and EJB Server, released under the Apache 2.0 License. OpenEJB has been integrated with J2EE application servers such as Geronimo, and WebObjects. [wikipedia]

• Supports EJB 3.0, 2.1, 2.0, 1.1 in all modes; embedded, standalone or otherwise.
• JAX-WS support JMS support
• J2EE connector support Can be dropped into Tomcat 5 or 6 adding various JavaEE 5 and EJB 3.0 features to a standard Tomcat install.
• CMP support is implemented over JPA allowing to freely mix CMP and JPA usage.
• Complete support for Glassfish descriptors allowing those users to embedded test their applications.
• Incredibly flexible JNDI name support allows you to specify formats at macro and micro levels and imitate the format of other vendors.
• Allows for easy testing and debugging in IDEs such as Eclipse, IntelliJ IDEA or NetBeans with no plugins required.
• Usable in ordinary JUnit or other style test cases without complicated setup or external processes.
• Validates applications entirely and reports all failures at once, with three selectable levels of detail,
• OSGi support

With OPENEJB simple session bean test takes for example: 2 seconds.