Working with EJB Handles, HomeHandles and EJBMetaData

The Enterprise JavaBeans specification describes how a session bean supports not only the methods defined on its remote interface but some additional methods: The purpose of handles is that they are serializable, once a handle is obtained for a bean instance it can be serialized, perhaps to a flat file. If, sometime later, a program wishes make calls against that same instance, it can deserialize the handle and start calling methods again. The implementations of the handles and the meta data class are product specific.
In CICS®, the implementations of the three interfaces HomeHandle, Handle and EJBMetaData are:
These implementations are included in the CICSEJBClient.jar JAR file, which can be downloaded from the utils subdirectory in the HFS area where CICS is installed. This jar should be included in the CLASSPATH of any client program calling the special methods described above, to ensure it understands the types of object returned from the server. If, for example, its CLASSPATH does not include CICSEJBClient.jar, a client program that calls the getEJBMetaData function of an enterprise bean may be returned either of the following:
  1. An exception
  2. Null
The precise value returned depends on the implentation of the client's object request broker (ORB).