Java Jargon

[shaf maff]

Can someone provide a brief explanation of the following frameworks/features and an ideal situation where you;d want to use them please:

Enterprise Java Bean (what is the different between an EJB and a 'normal' bean)
Spring
Hibernate/Java Persistance

I have tried reading them up but I cannot find any idea situation where I'd use them.

[Henry Wong]

Okay, I'll do the first one...

Enterprise Java Bean (what is the different between an EJB and a 'normal' bean)

EJBs is a standard that is supported by many application servers. If you write code that follows this standard, your code can be loaded into an application server and called by clients. Clients would generally use JNDI (supplied by the server) to find your bean and call your services.

Java beans is just a standard that allows code to be interchanged. With this standard, there are tools that can intropect your code (that follows this standard) and generate code that uses it. Standard Java Beans doesn't have all the stuff needed by servers to maintain it as a service -- as with EJBs.

Henry

[David Newton]

Spring provides a large set of functionality--your best bet is to look on the Spring website; some of the major stuff includes AOP, IoC/DI, transaction management, it has ORM and JDBC layers, its own web MVC, ad infinitum.

Hibernate is an ORM that bridges relational databases and objects.

[Jesper de Jong]

Wikipedia has clear explanations for almost anything:

Enterprise JavaBean
Spring Framework
Hibernate (Java)
Java Persistence API

[Paolo Robertson]

I'll try to reply as layman and as short as possible. Because I think you don't really intend to go into the detail of these technologies, but more into a general understanding, so that you'll get a hang of the jargon.

EJB pertains to the architecture created by Sun to support enterprise-level software development. You don't really "see" an EJB. It's more of a concept (a very complex concept). Normal beans on the other hand are regular classes that are comprised of member fields plus the setters and getters for those fields.

Spring is a framework. In short, it is simply used to implement a standard structure while doing software development. Spring is a very popular framework that's why you hear it often.

Hibernate is a persistence framework. It simplifies saving data into databases by creating mappings of classes to the actual databases.