The Application Server supports the Sun Microsystems Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) architecture as defined by the Enterprise JavaBeans Specification, v2.1 and is compliant with the Enterprise JavaBeans Specification, v2.0.
The Application Server is backward compatible with 1.1 and 2.0 enterprise beans. However, to take advantage of version 2.1 features, you should develop new beans as 2.1 enterprise beans.
The changes in the Enterprise JavaBeans Specification, v2.1 that impact enterprise beans in the Application Server environment are as follows:
EJB Timer Service: This is a container-managed, reliable, and transactional notification service that provides methods to allow callbacks to be scheduled for time-based events. See EJB Timer Service.
Message-driven beans: This type of enterprise bean can consume any inbound messages from a Connector 1.5 inbound resource adapter, primarily but not exclusively JMS messages. See Using Message-Driven Beans.
EJB Web Services: A stateless session bean can serve as a web service endpoint. In addition, all EJB component types can act as web service clients. For details, see the web service elements in the sun-ejb-jar.xml file, described in The sun-ejb-jar.xml File.