Michael Keith

Oracle Corporation

The Yellow Brick Road to Building EJB 3.0 Applications

It is now widely accepted that EJB 3.0 has significantly reduced the complexity required to develop enterprise applications. What is less known is how the EJB 3.0 specification has introduced new and more flexible ways of building, packaging and deploying business components and persistent entities. Not only do application developers have more development and packaging choices, but also more deployment options. All this while offering more portability across providers than ever before.

This talk will focus on the steps of building the various pieces of an EJB 3.0 and then assembling them into an application. It will start with the development artifacts including component beans and persistent entities and continue on to define the configuration and deployment metadata. It will then show how all of the pieces fit together into a deployment archive that can be successfully deployed into an EJB 3.0 Container. It will illustrate some of the alternatives and offer advice about when to use the different deployment patterns. Attendees will leave this talk feeling confident in their abilities to create and deploy their own EJB 3.0 application and will look forward to doing it on their own.

Getting to Know JPA: The New Enterprise Persistence Standard

One of the major accomplishments of the Java EE 5 platform released in May was the introduction of the Java Persistence API, a standardized lightweight POJO persistence API for enterprise Java. The new standard is fully integrated with the Java EE container resulting in a more holistic application development experience. Many of the development techniques that apply to programming with Java EE can also be used with JPA.

Counted amongst its many strengths is the fact that it is a fully-featured persistence framework that proffers a runtime library that is intuitive and concise. It is not only powerful but with a grand total of 4 classes in the API it is comprehensible. In addition, it is completely flexible in its configuration. Persistence mapping metadata may be supplied during development using annotations, at deployment using XML, or a combination of the two depending upon the requirements of the application. But with all of the enterprise integration of the API perhaps the most flexible part is that it can also be executed and tested outside the Java EE Container in a standalone application.

The talk will cover the important features of the Java Persistence API, including the EntityManager API, persistence units and persistence contexts, detached objects, object-relational mapping, and queries. We will also discuss running a JPA application outside the container and show examples of running unit tests on persistent entities.

Michael Keith is the co-specification lead of EJB 3.0 (JSR 220) and also a member of the Java EE 5 expert group (JSR 244). He has 15 years of teaching, research and practical experience in object-oriented and distributed systems, specializing in object persistence. His expertise has stemmed from designing and implementing numerous persistent object systems for Fortune 100 corporations. He has been involved in EJB since its initial release and other forms of persistence since long before EJB. He is currently an architect for Oracle TopLink and the Oracle OC4J J2EE Container and is a popular speaker at numerous conferences and events. Mike co-authored Pro EJB 3: Java Persistence API published by Apress. Email: michael.keith@oracle.com