HFE page 277
" A: Kind of. You're thinking of the session Facade
J2EE design
pattern. But even if you do put a session bean in front of an entity bean, the session bean is still a client. It might be a lot more efficient, because the session bean might not have as far to go on the network (and might even be on the same server as the entity). But if you'are keeping location-independence, then your session bean is still using the entity bean's Remote interface, so there's still a lot of overhead. "
Leon - SCJP, SCWCD, SCBCD, ICED