Summary
Using entity beans is a question for design, experience, need, and implemented technology. Entity beans are designed to handle all the persistence requirements for most enterprise applications. Entity beans, like session beans, are designed to be distributed objects with the following characteristics:
Entity beans provide persistence.
Entity beans are transactional.
Entity beans are multiuser.
Entity beans are long-lived.
Entity beans survive the life of the container.
The introduction of more advanced container managed persistence and the other important features added to the EJB specification has made building and ultimately managing an application much more efficient.
Reflections
Should I use container managed or bean managed persistence?
Should I design for use with local or remote interfaces?
Should entity beans be used to encapsulate nontraditional data access?