I am not sure what you are arriving at, but I hope my explanation will help.
The home interface has 3 kinds of methods:
1) create methods that return references to component interface
2) finders or getters that return reference to the component interface or a collection of them. The reason for having these is to find an existing bean
3) the business methods that return Value objects. The reason for having a business method is to use these value objects and get the entity data or a collection of them, so as to reduce network calls. That is, the bean can stay in pool to do the deed and does not need an EJBObject
What I understood is that 2) & 3) that are collectively called business methods, may return EJBObject references or value objects. Check pg 278.
The book at a later stage mentions that Home Business methods should not be used to return reference but data or value objects..
which page are you referring to here?
[ April 06, 2006: Message edited by: Sue Pillai ]