This book describes how to develop and deploy enterprise beans for the Java™ 2 SDK, Enterprise Edition (J2EE™ SDK). The J2EE SDK is the reference implementation provided by Sun Microsystems, Inc. for the J2EE platform, a component-based architecture for creating object-oriented, enterprise-level applications. To create an application, you assemble components written in the Java programming language. The components, which are called enterprise beans, implement business tasks or business entities.