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Container Services

<< Enterprise Information System Tier | Java EE Containers >>
<< Enterprise Information System Tier | Java EE Containers >>

Container Services

services in the form of a container for every component type. Because you do not have to
develop these services yourself, you are free to concentrate on solving the business problem at
hand.
Container Services
Containers are the interface between a component and the low-level platform-specific
functionality that supports the component. Before a web, enterprise bean, or application client
component can be executed, it must be assembled into a Java EE module and deployed into its
container.
The assembly process involves specifying container settings for each component in the Java EE
application and for the Java EE application itself. Container settings customize the underlying
support provided by the Java EE server, including services such as security, transaction
management, Java Naming and Directory Interface
TM
(JNDI) lookups, and remote connectivity.
Here are some of the highlights:
The Java EE security model lets you configure a web component or enterprise bean so that
system resources are accessed only by authorized users.
The Java EE transaction model lets you specify relationships among methods that make up a
single transaction so that all methods in one transaction are treated as a single unit.
JNDI lookup services provide a unified interface to multiple naming and directory services
in the enterprise so that application components can access these services.
The Java EE remote connectivity model manages low-level communications between clients
and enterprise beans. After an enterprise bean is created, a client invokes methods on it as if
it were in the same virtual machine.
Because the Java EE architecture provides configurable services, application components within
the same Java EE application can behave differently based on where they are deployed. For
example, an enterprise bean can have security settings that allow it a certain level of access to
database data in one production environment and another level of database access in another
production environment.
The container also manages nonconfigurable services such as enterprise bean and servlet life
cycles, database connection resource pooling, data persistence, and access to the Java EE
platform APIs (see
"Java EE 5 APIs" on page 57
).
Container Types
The deployment process installs Java EE application components in the Java EE containers as
illustrated in
Figure 1­5
.
Java EE Containers
Chapter 1 · Overview
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