What Are Entity Beans?

If you've worked with databases, you're familiar with persistent data. Any change to the data will exist even after the database server is shut down. Entity beans are persistent objects. They typically represent business entities, such as customers, products, accounts, and orders. Normally, each entity bean has an underlying table in a relational database, and each instance of the bean corresponds to a row in that table. By persistence, we mean that the state of the entity bean in memory is synchronized with the data it represents in the database.

Multiple clients can share entity beans. Because those clients might want to change the same data, it's important that entity beans work within transactions.

Entity beans typically contain data-related logic that performs a task such as inserting, updating, or removing a customer record in the database.