EJB 2.0 Development with WebSphere Studio Application Developer

Entity bean design and construction best practices

In this example, we introduced a couple of best practices that we want to summarize in relation to the advanced entity bean concepts:

• Use of local interfaces— We modeled the entity beans to be used only within the JVM from other processes, in this case, other beans. Note that this is now a requirement of our beans because of the navigability in our relationships.

• Tailored accessor methods for many-to-many relationships— To simplify client programming, we suggest you define tailored add and remove methods to add and delete instances of m:m relationships (for example, addAccount for the Customer bean).