- An EJB container can host three types of beans: Session beans to model business processes, entity beans to represent business objects and message-driven beans to provide for asynchronous method calls. This paper addresses entity beans and their mapping to persistent storage, especially relational and object-relational databases. A tool named BeanMaker is presented which can do object mapping either automatically by metadata analysis of a database schema or manually based on intrinsic real world semantics supplied by the user. BeanMaker is a running prototype system with an intuitive GUI interface. This paper looks what's behind the scenes and focuses on design issues and concepts of code generation.
