Enterprise Java Beans

Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) is one of several Java APIs for modular construction of enterprise software. EJB is a server-side software component that encapsulates business logic of an application. An EJB web container provides a runtime environment for web related software components, including computer security, Java servlet lifecycle management, transaction processing, and other web services. The EJB specification is a subset of the Java EE specification.

The EJB specification was originally developed in 1997 by IBM and later adopted by Sun Microsystems (EJB 1.0 and 1.1) in 1999 and enhanced under the Java Community Process as JSR 19 (EJB 2.0), JSR 153 (EJB 2.1), JSR 220 (EJB 3.0), JSR 318 (EJB 3.1) and JSR 345 (EJB 3.2).

The EJB specification intends to provide a standard way to implement the server-side (also called "back-end") 'business' software typically found in enterprise applications (as opposed to 'front-end' user interface software). Such machine code addresses the same types of problems, and solutions to these problems are often repeatedly re-implemented by programmers. Enterprise JavaBeans is intended to handle such common concerns as persistence, transactional integrity, and security in a standard way, leaving programmers free to concentrate on the particular parts of the enterprise software at hand.

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