Enterprise JavaBeans, Third Edition

Improved Performance with Session Beans

In addition to defining the interactions among entity beans and other resources (workflow), session beans have another substantial benefit: they improve performance. The performance gains from using session beans are related to the concept of granularity. Granularity describes the scope of a business component, or how much business territory the component covers. The scope of these beans is limited to a single concept and can impact only the data associated with that concept. Session beans represent large, coarse-grained components with a scope that covers several business concepts—all the business concepts or processes the bean needs in order to accomplish a task. In distributed business computing, you rely on fine-grained components like entity beans to ensure simple, uniform, reusable, and safe access to data. Coarse-grained business components like session beans capture the interactions of entities or business processes that span multiple entities so that they can be reused; in doing so, they also improve performance on both the client and the server. As a rule of thumb, client applications should do most of their work with coarse-grained components like session beans, with limited direct interaction with entity beans.

To understand how session beans improve performance, we must address the most common problems cited with distributed component systems: network traffic, latency, and resource consumption.

Network Traffic and Latency with ...