I'm studying that on an entity bean component stub (or reference) it makes sense to have business methods to Delete, Update, Query that entity, to get the entity home reference (in order to get other entities of the same type) and...get an handle to the entity.
Now, while handles with stateful session beans have got a meaning (because the client is keeping a reference to business logic), I can't see the utility of having an handle to an underlying entity. On the opposite, I see it as potentially dangerous, because in the meantime (I mean between the moment when an Handle is retrieved and the moment when it is re-used to get a reference (or stub) to the
EJB[Local]Object it represents) the underlying entity can have been changed by someone else.
Marco Tedone<br />SCJP1.4,SCJP5,SCBCD,SCWCD