This book describes how to develop Enterprise Java Beans (EJB). It gives an overview of what EJB is and is a practical guide for developers. EJB is a server-side component architecture aiming at rapid application development for a distributed architecture. The idea behind EJB is that the development and runtime environment takes care of the middleware issues like persistency, transactions, security and distributed components. Unfortunately the book does not evaluate the technology and its performance; it explains how it works and only sometimes touches on performance and compliance issues. I was curious to see some recommendations when to use EJB and when to use other technology but no such evaluation is made.

An overview of the version of 1.0 of this new technology is given, although the 'standard' has already progressed to 1.1; the differences are given in an appendix.

The different types of EJB beans are described; stateful and stateless session beans and entity beans. Session beans are used for business logic and entity beans are used to support persistency. The integration with CORBA and RMI-IIOP is explained. In the last part of the book a full e-commerce example is given. This small complete example application is a valuable addition. The six appendixes cover RMI, JNDI, XML, EJB1.1 and include a reference and purchasing guide. The book reads easily but could have been more compact.