Developing enterprise beans

This topic describes an overall process for using the EJB tools to develop and deploy enterprise beans for use in J2EE applications.

The following steps describe a typical path through the EJB tools:

1. Create an EJB project.

2. Create enterprise beans or import beans to your EJB project.

3. Add methods to the home and remote interfaces.

4. Add custom finders or add EJBQL queries where necessary.

5. Add and define additional CMP fields when necessary.

6. Define relationships between beans as needed.

7. Define other EJB deployment descriptor elements

8. Map enterprise beans to relational database tables:
   • Generate a top-down mapping (create database tables from existing beans and map them to each other)

   • Generate a bottom-up mapping (create beans from a database schema and map them to each other)

   • Generate a meet-in-the-middle mapping (use existing beans and tables and map them to each other)

9. Update maps with the Mapping editor.

10. Create session bean facades or create EJB access beans for client applications to use.

11. Generate deployment code for your enterprise beans (optionally, you can generate deployment code from the command line.

12. Test the enterprise beans.

13. Export your EJB project to an EJB JAR file.

 

Related concepts

EJB application development
EJB architecture
Annotation-based programming overview

 

Related tasks

Creating enterprise beans