Try Declarative Programming with Annotations and Aspects

n our shared quest for more highly productive methods of developing software, those of us in the Java community have looked to J2EE to provide solutions for the more challenging technical problems of enterprise development such as distributed transaction management, concurrency, and object distribution. The idea behind this—that these complicated enterprise services could be implemented by application server vendors and leveraged by business developers—is indeed a very good idea. J2EE, and EJB specifically, has successfully provided a platform on which to build enterprise Java applications.

Part of this success results from the enablement of declarative programming, a style of development in which infrastructure services are declared rather than being explicitly coded and interspersed with business logic. EJB has proven the value of this style of programming by allowing enterprise concerns, such as transactions and security, to be declared in a deployment descriptor and handled by the container.