Until Java Enterprise Best Practices, advanced Java developers relied on the advice of a loose-knit community of fellow developers, time-consuming online searches for examples or suggestions for the immediate problem they faced, and tedious trial-and-error. But Java has grown to include a huge number of APIs, classes, and methods. Now it is simply too large for even the most intrepid developer to know it all. The need for a written compendium of J2EE Best Practices has never been greater. Java Enterprise Best Practices focuses on the Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) APIs. The J2EE APIs include such alphabet soup acronyms as EJB, JDBC, RMI, XML, and JMX.