Developing Enterprise Java Applications with J2EE™ and UML

Entity Bean Technology

For the client, an entity bean is seen as a component that provides methods to easily retrieve business data in whatever format the client needs. The technology level of these J2EE components involves specific classes, interfaces, methods, and fields that must exist to support the client interfaces and life cycle of the entity bean.

Home Interface

Every entity bean needs to provide a Home interface. This is the interface used by the client to invoke the basic EJB life cycle methods. During runtime, the EJB container only creates a single copy of this interface per deployed entity bean. Through this interface, all of the instances of a particular EJB can be created, found, and destroyed.

The Home interface of an entity bean ...