Design question

[Shreya Menon]

All,
We have to develop a J2EE based web site. I was planning to use Struts and J2EE core patterns and entity and facade ejbs in the backend.
But, today I heard about our database. Looks like the database will be drastically changing, like they can add a new table, change a field in an existing table, drop a table/field...
In this case, will using ejbs be a good option ?
All sugegstions welcome!!
Thanks

[Kishore Dandu]

A combination of EJB and DAO patterns will help in case of a change in database schema.
But, if the changes are drastic(like change in name of tables and some tables completely gone) it may involve some code changes to update/delete/create transactions and queries in the DAO related files.
Take a look at DAO pattern, it will most likely help your approach.
By the way, there is no facade bean, but sure there is a session bean. Just a observation.
Kishore.

[Shreya Menon]

oh, yeah I mean facade pattern[but a session bean].
THanks for ur suggestion.
In our case there can be some cases where tables can be gone..

[Ilja Preuss]

Why do you want to use EJBs at all? In my humble opinion, the complexity of EJBs only pays back if you make use of quite a huge amount of its features...
BTW, you might want to take a look at http://www.agiledata.org/ - especially http://www.agiledata.org/essays/implementationStrategies.html