You've raised many good points Francois. How do you marshal entity bean data
across the network? How are references to other EJB objects or home objects
handled? How do you control which sub-objects are sent as part of your state?
How is that data manifested across the network, where they might not be an EJB
container?
None of these issues are explicitly covered in the EJB 1.0 specification. I
view this as a major hurdle for EJB to overcome before it hits the mainstream.
I don't like the idea of shops building their own marshaling code, since that is
non-portable and violates the rapid application development EJB value
proposition.
Note that marshaling entity bean data across a network is intimately tied with
defining relationships between beans. Sometimes I want to send a whole graph of
bean data referenced off an entity bean, and sometimes I only want to send
certain branches of data within that graph. This is for performance reasons -
it doesn't make sense to send an entire graph of objects using since that may be
too much data to send. This is why simple serialization is probably
insufficient. There needs to be a portable way to control what data is sent.
-Ed
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