Embeddable EJB container

The embeddable Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) container is a container for enterprise beans that do not require a Java™ Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE).

TheWebSphere® Application Server embeddable EJB container is a container for enterprise beans that does not require a Java EE server to run. The EJB programming model and the EJB container services are now available for Java Platform, Standard Edition (Java SE) server.

The following are embeddable container usage scenarios:
  • EJB unit testing: developers can test their enterprise beans without needing a full server installation of WebSphere Application Server in their development environment.
  • Embedding enterprise beans in Java SE applications: developers can use enterprise beans and the functionality that is provided with an EJB container, for example, dependency injection, transactions, and security in stand-alone desktop applications.
The following advantages exist when using the WebSphere embeddable EJB container:
  • No server installation is necessary for EJB development, unit testing, and Java SE-based application deployment.
  • The embeddable container is a much smaller footprint, in terms of disk space and main memory, than the server-based container.
  • The embeddable container starts faster than the server-based container because it initializes only EJB-related components.
Be aware of the following limitations when using the embeddable container:
  • Inbound RMI/IIOP calls are not supported, which means that all EJB clients must exist within the same Java virtual machine (JVM) as the embeddable container.
  • Message driven beans (MDB) are not supported.
  • The embeddable container cannot be clustered for high availability per workload management. For a complete list of supported functions in the WebSphere embeddable container, see the topic, Embeddable EJB container functions.