WAS v8.5 > Develop applications > Develop EJB applications > Develop applications using the embeddable EJB containerEmbeddable EJB container
The embeddable EJB container is a container for enterprise beans that do not require a Java EE.
TheWebSphere Application Server embeddable EJB container is a container for enterprise beans that does not require a Java EE server to run. The EJB programming model and the EJB container services are now available for Java SE server.
The following are embeddable container usage scenarios:
- EJB unit testing: developers can test their enterprise beans without needing a full server installation of WAS in their development environment.
- Embedding enterprise beans in Java SE applications: developers can use enterprise beans and the functionality provided with an EJB container, for example, dependency injection, transactions, and security in stand-alone desktop applications.
The following advantages exist when using the WebSphere embeddable EJB container:
- No server installation is necessary for EJB development, unit testing, and Java SE-based application deployment.
- The embeddable container is a much smaller footprint, in terms of disk space and main memory, than the server-based container.
- The embeddable container starts faster than the server-based container because it initializes only EJB-related components.
Be aware of the following limitations when using the embeddable container:
- Inbound RMI/IIOP calls are not supported, which means that all EJB clients must exist within the same Java virtual machine (JVM) as the embeddable container.
- Message driven beans (MDB) are not supported.
- The embeddable container cannot be clustered for high availability per workload management. For a complete list of supported functions in the WebSphere embeddable container, see the topic, Embeddable EJB container functions.
Related information:
Embeddable EJB container functions