Containers

The J2EE application model divides enterprise applications into three fundamental parts: components, containers, and connectors. Components are the key focus of application developers, while system vendors implement containers and connectors to conceal complexity and promote portability. Containers intercede between clients and components, providing services transparently to both, including transaction support and resource pooling. Container mediation allows many component behaviors to be specified at deployment time, rather than in program code.

In the Application Server, each server instance includes two containers: web and EJB. A container is a runtime environment that provides services such as security and transaction management to J2EE components. Web components, such as Java Server Pages and servlets, run within the web container. Enterprise JavaBeans run within the EJB container.