Chapter 22. Working with Entity Beans

By Kunal Mittal and Jeff Marin

IN THIS CHAPTER

• What Are Entity Beans?

• What Do Entity Beans Provide?

• Entity Bean Life Cycle

• Entity Bean Classes and Interfaces

• Creating BMP Entity Beans

• Creating CMP Entity Beans

• Relationship Caching in EJBs

• Caching in Entity Beans

• WebLogic Query Language

• Advanced Entity Bean Features

• Tools for Working with EJBs in WebLogic Server 8.1

• EJB Features Deprecated in WebLogic 8.1

• Entity Bean Best Practices

Entity beans are a type of Enterprise JavaBeans used to represent data in some persistent storage; most commonly, a relational database. In this chapter, we learn about the two types of Entity beans—Bean Managed and Container Managed. We also learn about the specific features in WebLogic Server 8.1 that help optimize the performance and management of Entity beans. The chapter concludes with a discussion of some common design issues with Entity beans.