My first successful company sold EJBs. It was a nice hype; simple to get into and go from sitting in your underwear in the attic to 10s of millions of revenue and contracts and sitting at Fortune 1000 corps with the cto. And of course learning (me as a university student and geek still) rapidly that enterprise software is not about software but about process, support, sla, contracts, consultancy (we went from 400 devs to 400 IT consultants in an afternoon ugh), continuity, XML and communication.
>that enterprise software is not about software but about process,
True that ! NOTHING moves as slow as a B2B software contract, it can take 6+months and even sometimes years to go from proof-of-concept and golf-talks to actual first invoice being paid to you the provider.
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.
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.