Although EJB applications themselves are portable, the manner in which you install and run EJB products varies widely from one vendor to the next. For this reason it is nearly impossible to cover all the EJB products available, so I have chosen a radical but effective way to address these differences: workbooks.

To help you deploy the book examples in different EJB products, I will publish several free workbooks that you can use along with this book to run the examples on specific commercial and noncommercial EJB servers. The workbook for a specific product will address that product’s most advanced server. So, for example, if the vendor supports EJB 2.0, the examples in the workbook will address EJB 2.0 features. If, on the other hand, the vendor supports only EJB 1.1, the examples in the workbook will be specific to EJB 1.1.

Although I plan to publish workbooks for several different EJB servers, at least two workbooks will be made available immediately. These workbooks will be available free online (in PDF format) at http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/entjbeans3/ or http://www.titan-books.com.