Core J2EE™ Patterns: Best Practices and Design Strategies

Composite Entity

Context

Entity beans are not intended to represent every persistent object in the object model. Entity beans are better suited for coarse-grained persistent business objects.

Problem

In a J2EE application, clients (applications, JSPs, servlets, JavaBeans) access entity beans via their remote interfaces. Thus, every client invocation potentially routes through network stubs and skeletons, even if the client and the enterprise bean are in the same JVM, OS, or machine. When entity beans are fine-grained objects, clients tend to invoke more individual entity bean methods, resulting in high network overhead.

Entity beans represent distributed persistent business objects. Whether developing or migrating an application to the J2EE ...