Has anyone tried the astral clone pattern? Which to me looks very similar to value objects.

Rather than passing a value object you pass <i>this<i> back from the bean implementation. Although this differs the fact that it could have business methods other than accessor methods on the local copy.

And also apparently it is for CMP entity beans only.

Some info:
http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-12-2000/jw-1208-clones_p.html


What do people think?

I don't like this pattern at all :)
I've had a very long discussion with the author about it, but I don't want to post just my side here...
If you are interested send me an email and I'll send you a copy.

Regards
Gal