This third edition has been thoroughly revised to include complete coverage of three major changes in the EJB 2.0 specification: a new version of container-managed persistence; local interfaces; and a totally new kind of bean called the message driven bean. The third edition also contains an architecture overview, information on resource management and primary services, design strategies, and XML deployment descriptors. The new version of container-managed persistence (CMP) beans in 2.0 is more portable and robust than in the older 1.1 version. Most significant is the introduction of the relationship fields, which allow entity beans to declare relationships with each other as natural references. In order to make this huge leap in component relationships possible, EJB 2.0 had to redesign how entity beans are defined and interact. This text examines this critical CMP model in detail. The book also discusses local interfaces, which allow beans that are co-located to interact without the overhead of remote method calls. This improves the performance of beans considerably and complements the CMP relationship fields. Message driven beans are a new kind of enterprise bean based on asynchronous messaging and the Java Message service (JMS). Instead of responding to Java RMI calls, message driven beans process JMS messages sent by messaging clients. An entire chapter is devoted to message-driven beans and how to use them effectively. In addition, the third edition contains an architecture overview, information on resource management and primary services, design strategies, and XML deployment descriptors.