Tutorial Overview

Prerequisites:  The tutorial requires a good knowledge of Java.  The more advanced topics also require knowledge of JDBC.  Access to a database is also required for many of the exercises (though even without a database, the first few tutorial steps may be covered by using the included MS/Acces file.)

Approach:  This tutorial is meant for developers and is completely designed to be "hands-on".  The assumption is that you will learn most by doing, not by reading.  The tutorial is a guided approach to doing things in a manner that will lead you into learning the EJB concepts very quickly.  For best progress, it is recommended that you actually get all the examples working.  By doing this, you will gain familiarity with the actual practical issues.  Also spend some time on the exercises, these are designed to solidify your grasp of the material.

Tutorial Steps:  The steps in the tutorial are outlined below:

1. An overview of EJBs
2. Creating an Entity EJB
3. Deploying your Entity Bean
4. Using your Entity Bean
5. Entity Bean Finder methods
6. Building EJBs from scratch
7. Creating a Session EJB
8. Deploying your Session Bean
9. Using your Session Bean
10. A "Stateless" Session Bean
11. Using EJB Handles
12. The Deployment Descriptor
13. Linked EJBs
14. Accessing JDBC from EJBs
15. Transactions
16. Bean-managed persistence
17. Security
18. Further learning

If you are already familiar with some of the material, you might want to just complete any exercise(s) in that section and proceed to the next one.

First step:  An overview of EJBs