Originally posted by Keith Rosenfield:
Hey Anthony:
In this field, precision is a neccesity. If you say A, I will not assume you mean B. I also beleive in being concise but not at the expense of clarity.
Howdy folks. I think I have to agree with Keith on this point, for *this* forum (as opposed to the regular non-certification EJB forum, where I think Anthony's "shorthand" is exactly the way we discuss things in the real world.)
But it has definitely been my experience that if you say something that might be *parsed* a little differently by someone who is new to the technology, people *will* be confused. I know because I make some of those shortcuts myself in the book, and I always end up getting lots of (justified) questions and complaints.
So if I *say* "a client calls an MDB" there will definitely be newcomers who will be confused into thinking, "wait a minute... if an MDB does not have a component interface, then how does this happen?" We have to assume that there are people who are still in the learning stages and may be in the most basic level of understanding. Or, there may be folks just coming in from EJB 1.1 and so they really have no prior knowledge or experience with the new things like local interfaces or MDBs.
Anthony, you give such awesome and detailed explanations. They *are* very clear... except for the occasional shorthand. So I'd like to second what Keith said and suggest that you risk a little more carpal tunnel and assume that in THIS forum, there might be hundreds of lurkers who are at square one, and will take your words literally. So if you say, "client has a reference to a bean..." they'll take it to mean "client has a reference to an instance of a bean".
It has been very hard for me, for example, to try to get into the habit of *always* saying, "Client has a reference to an entity bean's component interface..." (especially since I came from EJB 1.1, were there the "component" interface was known only as "the remote interface").
Anyway, I think you're doing a TON to help people out here. I think I've picked up a few things from your explanations that I can really use, so thank-you. I also think Keith is doing a really good job of smoking out all those confusing or seemingly contradictory corners of the spec (or my book

).
Thanks again to everyone who has been answering questions and ESPECIALLY to those brave enough to ask them
Remember: there ARE no dumb questions.
cheers,
kathy