Overview of EJB technology.
Enterprise Java Beans (EJB) is a server-side component technology for Java EE based systems (JEE).
Beans are business logic components that implement a standard interface through which the bean is hooked into the bean container (= runtime object for bean).
A Java class implementing one of the standard bean interfaces is an Enterprise Java Bean. Beans can be accessed remotely, usually from a client tier.
The EJB standard was developed to provide a common framework for solving recurring problems in business application development like persistence, transactions,
security and runtime and lifecycle management. The EJB standard evolved greatly over time. EJB version 1 and 2 were complex and required to implement many interfaces
and exception handling in EJBs. EJB version 3 brought great simplifications and did away with interfaces by replacing these with annotations which provide greater flexibility while keeping complexity low. EJBs come in 3 different flavors: Stateless and stateful session beans and message driven beans. Entity beans of EJB version 1 and 2 were replaced by the Java Persistence API in EJB version 3.