Java Interview Questions -Part 5

Question What's new in the EJB 2.0 specification? (EJB)

Answer Following are the main features supported in EJB 2.0 * Integration of EJB with JMS * Message Driven Beans * Implement additional Business methods in Home interface which are not specific for bean instance. * EJB QL.



Question How many types of protocol implementations does RMI have? (RMI)

Answer RMI has at least three protocol implementations: Java Remote Method Protocol(JRMP), Internet Inter ORB Protocol(IIOP), and Jini Extensible Remote Invocation(JERI). These are alternatives, not part of the same thing, All three are indeed layer 6 protocols for those who are still speaking OSI reference model.



Question What are the different identifier states of a Thread? (CoreJava)

Answer The different identifiers of a Thread are:

R - Running or runnable thread

S - Suspended thread

CW - Thread waiting on a condition variable

MW - Thread waiting on a monitor lock

MS - Thread suspended waiting on a monitor lock



Question What is the need of Remote and Home interface. Why cant it be in one? (EJB)

Answer In a few words, I would say that the main reason is because there is a clear division of roles and responsabilities between the two interfaces.

The home interface is your way to communicate with the container, that is who is responsable of creating, locating even removing one or more beans.

The remote interface is your link to the bean, that will allow you to remotely access to all its methods and members.

As you can see there are two distinct elements (the container and the beans) and you need two different interfaces for accessing to both of them.



Question What is the difference between Java Beans and EJB?s? (EJB)

Answer Java Beans are client-side objects and EJBs are server side object, and they have completely different development, lifecycle, purpose.



Question Question With regard to Entity Beans, what happens if both my EJB Server and Database crash, what will happen to unsaved changes? Is there any transactional log file used? (EJB)

Answer Actually, if your EJB server crashes, you will not even be able to make a connection to the server to perform a bean lookup, as the server will no longer be listening on the port for incoming JNDI lookup requests. You will lose any data that wasn't committed prior to the crash. This is where you should start looking into clustering your EJB server.

Another Answer

Hi, Any unsaved and uncommited changes are lost the moment your EJB Server crashes. If your database also crashes, then all the saved changes are also lost unless you have some backup or some recovery mechanism to retrieve the data. So consider database replication and EJB Clustering for such scenarios, though the occurence of such a thing is very very rare. Thx, Uma All databse have the concept of log files(for exampe oracle have redo log files concept). So if data bases crashes then on starting up they fill look up the log files to perform all pending jobs. But is EJB crashes, It depend upon the container how frequenlty it passivates or how frequesntly it refreshes the data with Database.



Question Question Can you control when passivation occurs? (EJB)

Answer The developer, according to the specification, cannot directly control when passivation occurs. Although for Stateful Session Beans, the container cannot passivate an instance that is inside a transaction. So using transactions can be a a strategy to control passivation.

The ejbPassivate() method is called during passivation, so the developer has control over what to do during this exercise and can implement the require optimized logic.

Some EJB containers, such as BEA WebLogic, provide the ability to tune the container to minimize passivation calls.

Taken from the WebLogic 6.0 DTD -

"The passivation-strategy can be either "default" or "transaction". With the default setting the container will attempt to keep a working set of beans in the cache. With the "transaction" setting, the container will passivate the bean after every transaction (or method call for a non-transactional invocation)."



Question Does RMI-IIOP support dynamic downloading of classes? (RMI)

Answer No, RMI-IIOP doesn't support dynamic downloading of the classes as it is done with CORBA in DII (Dynamic Interface Invocation).Actually RMI-IIOP combines the usability of Java Remote Method Invocation (RMI) with the interoperability of the Internet Inter-ORB Protocol (IIOP).So in order to attain this interoperability between RMI and CORBA,some of the features that are supported by RMI but not CORBA and vice versa are eliminated from the RMI-IIOP specification.



Question Does EJB 1.1 support mandate the support for RMI-IIOP ? What is the meaning of "the client API must support the Java RMI-IIOP programming model for portability, but the underlying protocol can be anything" ? (EJB)

Answer EJB1.1 does mandate the support of RMI-IIOP.

OK, to answer the second question:

There are 2 types of implementations that an EJB Server might provide: CORBA-based EJB Servers and Proprietry EJB Servers. Both support the RMI-IIOP API but how that API is implemented is a different story. (NB: By API we mean the interface provided to the client by the stub or proxy).

A CORBA-based EJB Server actually implements its EJB Objects as CORBA Objects (it therefore encorporates an ORB and this means that EJB's can be contacted by CORBA clients (as well as RMI-IIOP clients)

A proprietry EJB still implements the RMI-IIOP API (in the client's stub) but the underlying protocol can be anything. Therefore your EJB's CANNOT be contacted by CORBA clients. The difference is that in both cases, your clients see the same API (hence, your client portability) BUT how the stubs communicate with the server is different.