John

• May 3rd, 2005

 

We can describe the following common rules for choosing whether to use remote client view or local client view: 
 
When you will potentially use a distributed environment (if your enterprise bean should be independent of its deployment place), you should obviously choose remote client view. 
 
Use remote client view when you need to be sure that parameters passed between your EJB and the client (and/or other enterprise beans) should be passed "by value" instead of "by reference." With pass-by-value, the bean will have its own copy of the data, completely separated from the copy of the data at the client. With local client view, you can do pass-by-reference, which means your bean, as well as the client, will work directly with one copy of the data. Any changes made by the bean will be seen by the client and vice versa. Pass-by-reference eliminates time/system expenses for copying data variables, which provides a performance advantage. 
 
If you create an entity bean, you need to remember that it is usually used with a local client view. If your entity bean needs to provide access to a client outside of the existing JVM (i.e., a remote client), you typically use a session bean with a remote client view. This is the so-called Session Facade pattern, the goal of which is that the session bean provides the remote client access to the entity bean. 
 
If you want to use container-managed relationship (CMR) in your enterprise bean, you must expose local interfaces, and thus use local client view. This is mentioned in the EJB specification. 
 
Enterprise beans that are tightly coupled logically are good candidates for using local client view. In other words, if one enterprise bean is always associated with another, it is perfectly appropriate to co-locate them (i.e., deploy them both in one JVM) and organize them through a local interface.