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I still don't understand what they are.

Basically data objects loaded via orm, with code to repersist to database when updated.

... except there was a long road of transactions, distributed architecture issues, etc still to hammer out, and these were the days of a gig of ram maybe and no ssds, and 100 base t if you were lucky. And jit was a wip.

So it was a app server with its own dedicated mumbo jumbo for everything to dazzle CEOs.

And in my day, if I recall correctly, it took a good dozen or so XML files to describe and configure a single EJB.

Thanks, JOnAS. I still have hate in my heart.

And now ORM in Java (with JPA) is a simple @Entity. Ahh, the warm, cozy feeling of abstraction.

You are talking about JPA entities, javabeans are nothing more than objects managed by an application server (or nowadays without them as well with spring boot), whose instances can be queried and loaded dynamically. It is basically a huge map of strings to java objects, and objects range from database connections (which were then configured outside of the program, making configuration decoupled, e.g. at deployment one could even change connection pooling, database vendor, etc) to remote objects on another computer to ldap to.. well, anything.

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