Ever try to write a J2EE application accessing EJBs across a firewall? It can be messy, and developers often must resort to all kinds of workarounds, none of them particularly "neat." Developers often write a servlet to intercept HTTP requests and delegate them to EJBs, which is kind of a kludge. Another approach that uses tunneling technologies-such as RMI over HTTP-can entail a big performance hit. But there is a better way. You can solve this problem elegantly by using Java Secure Socket Extension (JSSE).
As J2EE has become the enterprise development platform of choice, more and more J2EE-based applications are going into production. One important component of the J2EE platform is the Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) API. Together, J2EE and EJB technology offer many advantages, but with these advantages come new challenges. In particular, any problem in an enterprise system must be resolved quickly. In this article, Enterprise Java programming veteran Srikanth Shenoy reveals his best practices in EJB exception handling for faster problem resolution.