EJBs for Everyone: Consume EJBs in .NET Using C# and a Web Service

he complexity involved in building enterprise-class apps is, unfortunately, beyond the skill-set of your average developer. It requires the consideration of a lot more than your actual application logic. The framework on which your application resides needs to handle high traffic, availability, and performance—all before you even write the specifics of your application! Done correctly, the framework takes care of the broad requirements of performance and scalability, leaving your developers free to write applications that are concerned only with their application-specific logic.

Architects generally face a fork in the road in the planning stages when designing an enterprise system. Should you build all of it yourselves? Going down to the level of threading models, messaging queues, object pools, and database connection pools? Or should you use an off-the-shelf enterprise application framework? This is where the J2EE spec, and more importantly the application server that implements this spec, comes in handy. If you choose to use an application server such as WebSphere, Weblogic, or JBoss, the infrastructure is already built for you. More importantly, it is tested and proven in many environments. In many cases, this is clearly a better option than trying to grow your own and test, deploy, and maintain it.