Enterprise JavaBeans, Third Edition

Passing Objects by Value

Passing objects by value is tricky with Enterprise JavaBeans. Two simple rules will keep you out of most problem areas: objects that are passed by value should be fine-grained dependent objects or wrappers used in bulk accessors, and dependent objects should be immutable.

EJB 1.1: Dependent Objects

The concept of dependent objects was addressed in Chapter 6, which describes the use of dependent objects in EJB 2.0. But for EJB 1.1, dependent objects are a new concept. EJB 2.0 and EJB 1.1 use dependent objects differently, because EJB 2.0 can accommodate much more fine-grained entity beans than EJB 1.1.

Dependent objects are objects that have meaning only within the context of another business object. They typically represent fairly fine-grained business concepts, such as an address, phone number, or order item. For example, an address has little meaning when it is not associated with a business object such as Person or Organization. It depends on the context of the business object to give it meaning. Such an object can be thought of as a wrapper for related data. The fields that make up an address (street, city, state, and zip) should be packaged together in a single object called AddressDO. In turn, the AddressDO object is usually an attribute or property of another business object; in EJB, we would typically see a dependent object such as AddressDO as a property of an entity bean.

Here’s a typical implementation of an AddressDO object:

public class AddressDO ...