Hi all,
I am a complete newbie in EJB development. Currently I am designing a B2B model for my project. I want my main system to be able to talk to other suppliers' system in XML. I know that I can do a 1-way channel from the supplier to my system using EJB easily, but what about dulplex communication? Do I have to deploy beans at the supplier's side, making effectivly 2 one-way channels? or there's a smarter way to do this? sorry if this is a really trivial question and thanks for all the help.

This is a very common request that has brought about some features EJB 2.0 specification and J2EE v1.3. This includes support for JMS and MessageBeans. Using this architecture you can use asynchronous communications and messages with XML content for B2B. I have not read the specs but did attend the JavaONE presentation on EJB2.0 (http://java.sun.com/javaone/javaone00/replay.html).

You will also want to take a look at ebxml at http://www.ebxml.org.

If you need something today, I would keep the design open to EJB2.0.

Thks for the help....just one more really really dump question, does J2EE support EJB2.0 now? I couldn't find anything on the sun site saying that. Or I will have to stick with EJB1.1 with JMS for the time being? Thanks for giving me a hand, as I am an extremely new newbie..only about a month old. Thanks!!

You can't really say that J2EE supports EJB 2.0, since EJB 2.0 hasn't come out yet, and EJB is part of J2EE. For a tried and true architecture, stick with EJB1.1 and JMS. However, if you want your app. to be EJB2.0 "like", and easily port it to EJB 2.0 later, you can. You can even simulate message driven beans using the framework from that new JMS article in the resources section of TheServerSide.

Floyd