Below paragraph is from
http://java.sun.com/blueprints/patterns/CompositeEntity.html It is important to note that this pattern is still viable with
EJB 2.0 and Local Entity Beans. In both a local and a distributed environment there are drawbacks to using remote entity beans to model fine-grained or dependent business objects, so the composite entity pattern is applicable in both cases. Before EJB 2.0 existed, a common strategy for composite entity implementations was to use a Remote Entity Bean for the parent and use
Java objects instead of remote entity beans for the dependent objects in a parent-child relationship. This also meant that the parent usually used Bean-managed persistence so it had to write the code to manage the relationships to the other objects also. But with the introduction of local entity beans in EJB 2.0, the strategy of using local entity beans to model fine-grained entities and dependent objects is recommended. An additional benefit of this strategy is that since all the objects in this strategy are Entity beans, you can efficiently use container-managed persistence and avoid writing code to manage the relationships.
