Enterprise JavaBeans 3.0, 5th Edition

Chapter 6. Mapping Persistent Objects

In this chapter, we’ll take a thorough look at the process of developing entity beans—specifically, mapping them to a relational database. A good rule of thumb is that entity beans model business concepts that can be expressed as nouns. Although this is a guideline rather than a requirement, it helps determine when a business concept is a candidate for implementation as an entity bean. In grammar school, you learned that nouns are words that describe a person, place, or thing. The concepts of “person” and “place” are fairly obvious: a person entity might represent a customer or passenger, and a place entity might represent a city or port of call. Similarly, entity beans often represent “things:” real-world objects like ships and credit cards, and abstractions such as reservations. Entity beans describe both the state and behavior of real-world objects and allow developers to encapsulate the data and business rules associated with specific concepts; a Customer entity encapsulates the data and business rules associated with a customer, for example. This makes it possible for data associated with a concept to be manipulated consistently and safely.

In Titan’s cruise ship business, we can identify hundreds of business concepts that are nouns and, therefore, could conceivably be modeled by entity beans. We’ve already seen a simple Cabin entity in Chapter 4, and we’ll develop Customer and Address entities in this chapter. Titan could clearly use a ...