Information posted on Javaranch seems to suggest that DAO is better than Local Entity beans for read operations even without their remote invocation overhead.
However, a valid point was also made out that changing a table structure can lead to a change in CMP mapping and DAO SQL.
Could some one throw more light on the performance difference between the two considering the typical (search flight..) read operation(s) of the assignment as a context. Is the performance difference too pronounced to over look the reduced maintainability that may come as a result of using DAO's as well?
As of now, i am inclined to have a SLSB invoke DAO to implement 'Search Flight' function. So i can have Segment/Flight/.. as simple Java structures rather than entity beans.