Head First EJB

When finders have a dark side...

With a Remote interface, finder and create methods give back Remote stubs.

That means you have to make remote method calls on each one to get the data you want.

There are no Dumb Questions

Q:	Q: Wait... I thought it was bad design to make all those method calls from the client ANYWAY. Wouldn’t the client usually go through a session bean? And the session bean would then talk to the entity bean?
A:	A: Kind of. You’re thinking of the Session Facade J2EE design pattern. But even if you do put a session bean in front of an entity bean, the session bean is still a client. It might be a lot more efficient, because the session bean might not have as far to go on the network (and might even be on the same server as the entity). But if you’re keeping location-independence, then your session bean is still using the entity bean’s Remote interfaces, so there’s still a lot of overhead.
Q:	Q: Couldn’t you just have a business method in the component interface that returns data? Like, return a collection of Strings?
A:	A: You’re getting warmer. Yes, that’s the way you might have done it in EJB 1.1. But that’s kludgey, because you have to first get a reference to some customer, just so you can ask that customer to give you back the data for all customers.