Day 8. Understanding Entity Beans

Today you'll learn about entity beans that were first introduced in the EJB 1.0 specification. They were made mandatory in the EJB 1.1 specification and later enhanced in EJB 2.0.

The EJB architecture greatly simplifies the connection between the application and the database tiers. The EJB 2.0 specification takes this benefit to the next level by enabling developers to develop portable applications that are database-independent and free of database access code.

Entity beans are persistent objects. We'll examine their characteristics and how they differ from session beans.

Next, you'll learn entity bean types bean-managed persistence and container-managed persistence and explore why container-managed persistent beans are portable and simpler to develop. Then we'll examine the methods that you need to implement for an entity bean class. Finally, we'll look at the life cycle of the entity bean instance.