Definition of a Java Container

Referring more generally to the Container pattern (of which an enterprise Java container could be considered a specialization), the book Server Component Patterns by M.Volter, et al. offers the following:

[A CONTAINER provides] an execution environment that is responsible for adding the technical concerns to the COMPONENTS…Conceptually, it wraps the COMPONENTS, thus giving clients the illusion of of tightly-integrated functional and technical concerns.

Examples of such technical concerns include security, transaction management, logging, etc.

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