= Concepts
:index-group: Unrevised
:jbake-date: 2018-12-05
:jbake-type: page
:jbake-status: published

OpenEJB was founded on the idea that it would be embedded into
third-party environments whom would likely already have three things:

* their one "server" platform with existing clients and protocols
* their own way to configure their platform
* existing services like TransactionManager, Security, and Connector

Thus the focus of OpenEJB was to create an EJB implementation that would
be easily embeddible, configurable, and customizable.

Part of achieving that is a drive to be as simple as possible as to not
over-define and therefore restrict the ability to be embeddible,
configurable and customizable. Smaller third-party environments could
easily 'downscale' OpenEJB in their integrations by replacing standard
components with lighter implementations or removing them all together
and larger environments could 'upscale' OpenEJB by replacing and adding
heavier implementations of those standard components likely tailored to
their systems and infrastructure.

Container and Server are mentioned in the EJB spec as being separate
things but are never defined formally. In our world Containers, which
implement the basic component contract and lifecycle of a bean are not
coupled to any particular Server, which has the job of providing a
naming service and providing a way for it's clients to reference and
invoke components (beans) hosted in Containers. Because Containers have
no dependence at all only Server, you can run OpenEJB without any Server
at all in an embedded environment for example without any work or any
extra overhead. Similarly you can add as many new Server components as
you want without ever having to modify any Containers.

There is a very strong pluggability focus in OpenEJB as it was always
intended to be embedded and customized in other environments. As a
result all Containers are pluggable, isolated from each other, and no
one Container is bound to another Container and therefore removing or
adding a Container has no repercussions on the other Containers in the
system. TransactionManager, SecurityService and Connector also pluggable
and are services exposed to Containers. A Container may not be dependent
on specific implementations of those services. Service Providers define
what services they are offering (Container, Connector, Security,
Transaction, etc.) in a file they place in their jar called
service-jar.xml.

The service-jar.xml should be placed not in the META-INF but somewhere
in your package hierarchy (ours is in
/org/apache/openejb/service-jar.xml) which allows the services in your
service-jar.xml to be referenced by name (such as
DefaultStatefulContainer) or more specifically by package and id (such
as org.apache.openejb#DefaultStatefulContainer).

The same implementation of a service can be declared several times in a
service-jar.xml with different ids. This allows for you to setup several
several different profiles or pre-configured versions of the services
you provide each with a different name and different set of default
values for its properties.

In your openejb.conf file when you declare Containers and Connectors, we
are actually hooking you up with Service Providers automatically. You
get what is in the org/apache/openejb/service-jar.xml by default, but
you are able to point specifically to a specific Service Provider by the
'provider' attribute on the Container, Connector, TransactionManager,
SecurityService, etc. elements of the openejb.conf file. When you
declare a service (Container, Connector, etc.) in your openejb.conf file
the properties you supply override the properties supplied by the
Service Provider, thus you only need to specify the properties you'd
like to change and can have your openejb.conf file as large or as small
as you would like it. The act of doing this can be thought of as
essentially instantiating the Service Provider and configuring that
instance for inclusion in the runtime system.

For example Container(id=NoTimeoutStatefulContainer,
provider=DefaultStatefulContainer) could be declared with it's Timeout
property set to 0 for never, and a
Container(id=ShortTimeoutStatefulContainer,
provider=DefaultStatefulContainer) could be declared with it's Timeout
property set to 15 minutes. Both would be instances of the
DefaultStatefulContainer Service Provider which is a service of type
Container.