# EJB application development

The workbench provides a specialized environment that you can use to develop and test enterprise beans that conform to the distributed component architecture defined in the Sun Microsystems Enterprise JavaBeans™ (EJB) specification. This product supports the Enterprise JavaBeans 1.1, 2.0, and 2.1 specification levels.

The complete Enterprise JavaBeans specifications and descriptions of the technology are available from the java.sun.com Web site.

If you are not familiar with enterprise beans or related EJB technology, see EJB architecture for a brief description of key EJB concepts.

The EJB development environment includes the following tools:

- The J2EE perspective
- Tools for importing existing EJB JAR files
- Tools for exporting existing EJB projects into JAR files
- Tools for creating session and message-driven enterprise beans
- Tools for validating your enterprise beans for specification compliance

J2EE perspective
  All of the EJB tools are accessible from the J2EE perspective. This perspective provides a layout in which the most commonly used actions, views, and wizards for J2EE and EJB development are easily accessible
Creating enterprise beans
  The EJB tools help you create enterprise beans (either with or without inheritance), such as session beans or message-driven beans.

  You can also accomplish complementary enterprise bean development activities, such as writing and editing business logic, importing or exporting enterprise beans, and maintaining both your enterprise bean source code and generated code using the built in Java™ development tools, along with the team and version control capabilities of the workbench.

Validating enterprise bean code
  The EJB tools automatically validate that your enterprise bean code is consistent and that it conforms to the rules defined by the Enterprise JavaBeans specifications. Code verification occurs whenever an enterprise bean or its properties are changed. Errors and warnings are displayed in the Problems view of the workbench. Files with errors also display error icons.

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