Patrick Ravenel

Persistence in Enterprise JavaBeans is encapsulated in the notion of EntityBeans. This article describes bean- and container-managed EntityBean persistence and the relative merit of these techniques with respect to portability, productivity and performance. Sun Microsystems produced the Enterprise JavaBeans specification (version 1.0) in March 1998. According to its cover page, the goal of the specification was to provide a "component architecture for the development and deployment of object-oriented distributed, enterprise-level applications." Two important conceptual components were described by this architecture: "EnterpriseBeans" and their "container." EnterpriseBeans are of two varieties: SessionBeans and EntityBeans. SessionBeans don't have persistent state; EntityBeans do. In other words, you can't expect the state of SessionBeans to outlive their process. En... (more)