Read-Only Bean Characteristics and Life Cycle

Read-only beans are best suited for situations where the underlying data never changes, or changes infrequently. For example, a read-only bean can be used to represent a stock quote for a particular company, which is updated externally. In such a case, using a regular entity bean might incur the burden of calling ejbStore, which can be avoided by using a read-only bean.

Read-only beans have the following characteristics:

• Only entity beans can be read-only beans.

• Either bean-managed persistence (BMP) or container-managed persistence (CMP) is allowed. If CMP is used, do not create the database schema during deployment. Instead, work with your database administrator to populate the data into the tables. See Chapter 7, Using Container-Managed Persistence for Entity Beans.

• Only container-managed transactions are allowed; read-only beans cannot start their own transactions.

• Read-only beans don’t update any bean state.

• ejbStore is never called by the container.

• ejbLoad is called only when a transactional method is called or when the bean is initially created (in the cache), or at regular intervals controlled by the bean’s refresh-period-in-seconds element in the sun-ejb-jar.xml file.

• The home interface can have any number of find methods. The return type of the find methods must be the primary key for the same bean type (or a collection of primary keys).

• If the data that the bean represents can change, then refresh-period-in-seconds must be set to refresh the beans at regular intervals. ejbLoad is called at this regular interval.

A read-only bean comes into existence using the appropriate find methods.

Read-only beans are cached and have the same cache properties as entity beans. When a read-only bean is selected as a victim to make room in the cache, ejbPassivate is called and the bean is returned to the free pool. When in the free pool, the bean has no identity and is used only to serve any finder requests.

Read-only beans are bound to the naming service like regular read-write entity beans, and clients can look up read-only beans the same way read-write entity beans are looked up.