Implementing a Small EJb Container

Question

Is there any generic document to study how the ejb container is implemented? in other words, is there a document to know more about how to implement a small ejb container that can load and manage beans, atleast session beans. I cannot find in any opensource ejb containers page information about the inner workings of the container. although i got some info from the developes guide.

thanks V

Answer 1

The answer to the question is almost too big.. there are so many aspects of EJB and Java EE.

Some stackoverflow answers of mine that have some "under the covers" information:

• Transaction propagation and thread locals - How does UserTransaction propagate?
• All EJBs are proxied - How is the return-value of SessionContext.getBusinessObject() different from 'this' keyword used in the bean?
• JPA and Transactions - Understanding EJB3/JPA container-level transactions and isolation level
• Asynchronous methods - Is it safe to start a new thread in a JSF managed bean?

Not on stackoverflow but also good: - Understanding Container-Managed JPA

Answer 2

You can try to look at the sources of the existing projects like JBoss or JBoss Embedded ejb container, that should help a lot. You can implement the specs the way you want, it doesn't matter how you do it as long as you conform to the specs (if you want to be J2EE compilant of course)

Answer 3

You'd probably want to start with the EJB specification and the API classes.