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J2EE Technology Enterprise JavaBeans is the server-side component architecture for the J2EE platform. EJB enables rapid and simplified development of distributed, transactional, secure and portable Java applications.

One Year Old and Going Strong

No technology is viable over the long term on buzz alone. So, a year after releasing the first Enterprise JavaBeans^TM component architecture specification, we're pleased to see the early promises of this new technology being fulfilled.

Within Sun Microsystems and throughout the industry, the momentum of the Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) technology is building. Partners large and small -- developers of application servers, transaction process monitors, object request brokers, database management systems, and others -- have released a variety of Enterprise JavaBeans technology-based products, or announced plans to do so. The variety of the offerings includes EJB technology-enabled servers, development and deployment tools, standardized enterprise beans, and complete component-based applications. In addition, Sun Microsystems has announced a roadmap for rolling out the Java^TM 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition -- a unified architecture for supporting the Enterprise JavaBeans architecture-based components, along with reference implementations and compatibility tests to help developers achieve the ideal of "Write Once, Run Anywhere^TM" in the server environment.

What's behind the success of EJB architecture?

To understand the momentum of Enterprise JavaBeans technology, a little background is in order.

During the early 90s, traditional enterprise information system providers began responding to customer needs by shifting from the two-tier, client-server application model to more flexible three-tier and multi-tier application models. The new models separated business logic from system services and the user interface, placing it in a middle tier between the two. The evolution of new middleware services -- transaction monitors, message-oriented middleware, object request brokers, and others -- gave additional impetus to this new architecture. And the growing use of the internet and intranets for enterprise applications contributed to a greater emphasis on lightweight, easy to deploy clients.

Multi-tier design dramatically simplifies developing, deploying, and maintaining enterprise applications. It enables developers to focus on the specifics of programming their business logic, relying on various backend services to provide the infrastructure, and client-side applications (both standalone and within web browsers) to provide the user interaction. Once developed, business logic can be deployed on servers appropriate to existing needs of an organization. But because the multitier model has until now been implemented with a variety of divergent standards, it has limited developers' ability to efficiently build applications from standardized components, to deploy a single application on a wide variety of platforms, or to readily scale applications to meet changing business conditions.

Within Sun's Java Software division, several development efforts pointed us toward what would become the EJB technology. First, the servlet technology showed that developers were eager to create CGI like behaviors that could run on any web server that supported the Java platform. Second, the JDBC^TM technology gave us a model for marrying the "Write Once, Run Anywhere" features of the Java programming language to existing database management systems. Finally, the JavaBeans^TM component architecture demonstrated the usefulness of encapsulating complete sets of behavior into easily configurable, readily reusable components on the client side. The convergence of these three concepts -- server-side behaviors written in the Java programming language, connectors to enable access to existing enterprise systems, and modular, easy to deploy components -- led us and our industry partners to the EJB standard.

Component based, multi-tier applications are the future of enterprise computing. And developers who use the Enterprise JavaBeans technology lead the way in realizing the benefits of these components: portability and scalability to a wide range of enterprise servers, along with simplified application development, deployment, and maintenance. Thanks to Enterprise JavaBeans technology, the era of server-side components dedicated to the "Write Once, Run Anywhere" vision is here.