Hi all,

I am relatively new to the EJB field and have general design problems concering
entity beans.
I heard from various sources that entity beans should just implement the simple get/set methods. Session Beans should offer the business methods. This refers to the Session Facade Pattern. I agree with that, but what happens if you actually do not need complex business methods all the way, e.g. for creating entity beans. Should you write a dummy proxy, which might be extended in the future? What do you do with all the simple get/set methods? Do you also write proxys in case some business logic might be wrapped inside later?
For me a facade pattern only makes sense if you use it all the way and "forbid" access to the entity bean directly. But if that means you have to write a lot of proxy methods and probably have to introduce value objects, it ends up in a big hassle...
Don't get me wrong, I think Value Objects are a nice idea, but do you need them with local ejb's (performancewise)? It adds another layer of complexity.

In fear of "over-designing",

Kai

I would suggest the following (as I do it myself):
- use value objects always; I never have getter/setters for properties in the remote interface, I use the value objects instead
- if entity related business methods only apply to that entity and/or to entirely contained other entities I implement that business method in the entity itself.
- business methods that span multiple EJB's are implemented in a session bean

Still, I never allow access to an entity bean from a client directly. So sometimes I have just a delegation method in my session bean, like in the case that the business method is already implemented in the entity ejb. But I've seen that I rarely encounter this situation.

After 3 projects with EJB's I have stopped considering EJB's as a way to implement a pure object oriented design model.
I use it now as an infrastructure that offers distribution, load balancing, transactions and a very primitive form of O/R mapping.

Dirk offers sound advice. The use of Value Objects is not overdesigning.

But with the introduction of Local Interfaces, (now that EJB2.0 is finally "final") is there any more need for Value Objects within the app server - for bean to bean communication that is?

I do see the need for Value Objects for calls between a client and the Session Facade.

--Das