The Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) specification is one of Java's success stories; a standard for enterprise web application development that has wide industry support.

J2EE is basically a collection of specifications for web services, business objects, data access, and messaging. They define the way in which web applications communicate with the servers that host them. J2EE focuses on two things - creating a standard that allows web applications to be portable between servers, and giving the server control of component lifecycle and other resources, in order that it can handle issues of scaling, concurrency, transaction management, and security.

This book is based around one of the most popular J2EE and EJB implementations, BEA WebLogic Server. The authors work for BEA in Europe, providing technical support for customer's implementations of Weblogic-based solutions. They have first-hand knowledge of the practical difficulties developers face in applying J2EE and WebLogic to their projects, and in debugging and testing these applications. This book is a distillation of their real-world expertise.