In Bitter EJB, Bruce Tate and his co-authors continue the entertaining and engaging writing style of relating true-life adventure sport experiences to antipattern themes established in Bruce's first book, the best selling Bitter Java. This more advanced book explores antipatterns, or common traps, within the context of EJB technology. EJB is experiencing the mixture of practical success and controversy that accompanies a new and quickly-changing framework. Bitter EJB takes the swirling EJB controversies head-on. It offers a practical approach to design: how to become a better programmer by studying problems and solutions to the most important problems surrounding the technology. The flip side of design patterns, antipatterns, are a fun and interesting way to take EJB expertise to the next level. The book covers many different aspects of EJB, from transactions to persistence to messaging, as well as performance and testing. Bitter EJB will teach programmers to do the following: * Identify EJB persistence strategies * Choose Entity bean alternatives * Use EJB message driven beans * Know when to apply or avoid stateful session beans * Create efficient build strategies with XDoclet, Ant and JUnit * Automate performance tuning