Shared components across containers

The following Branch Transformation Toolkit components are shared across the Web container and EJB container of the application server:

Data elements
A data element is a field that contains a value or a collection of other data elements. Certain data elements are type-aware. The typed data elements represent business objects such as Date, ProductNumber, and Money. Each typed data element has an associated property descriptor, which provides information about the data such as its type, its validator, and its set of converters.
CHA
The Common Hierarchical Area holds data within a context hierarchy for the Business Process Component when it performs a business process. This is a distributed component that allows the data to exist anywhere. It also enables non-toolkit applications to store general global session data. The application uses the CHA API to mover data into and out of the CHA.
CHA Formatter Service
The CHA Formatter Service handles formatting and unformatting of strings and data items for applications and services. It converts a specific data item into a string representation of the data item and parses a string into a specific data item.
Events
An event is how components within the application presentation layer communicate with each other. A notifier is the sender of an event. A handler, as the receiver of that event, is responsible for consuming the event or propagating it to other handlers. An Event Manager acts as the event controller between notifiers and handlers to manage both local and remote events.
Externalizers
An externalizer is an object factory that uses definitions in an external file to instantiate a specific toolkit entity. The toolkit provides externalizers for contexts, data elements, formatters, services, and flow processors. The definition files are ASCII files using XML syntax. This makes configuring and customizing these defined objects (or implementing new ones) possible with something as simple as a basic text editor although the Development Workbench provides an easier and more controlled environment for this editing.
Exceptions
A toolkit exception enhances the standard Java(TM) exception mechanism to facilitate applications accessing information about the exception.
Trace Facility
The Trace Facility provides a way to see what is happening with an application while it is running. The information it logs can be used to solve problems during development and during runtime.