The client tier in an EJB system needs a way to transfer bulk data with the server, as the J2EE aplications implement server side business component.Some methods exposed by the business components return data to the client. Often, the client invokes a business object's get methods multiple times until it obtains all the attribute values.

If the client needs to display or update a set of attributes that live on the server, these attributes could live in an entity bean or be accessible through a session bean. The client could get or update the data is by loading many parameters into a method call, when updating data on the server, or by making multiple fine-grained calls to the server to retrieve data. Every call between the client and server is a remote method call with substantial network overhead. If the client application calls the individual getter and setter methods that require or update single attribute values, it will require as many remote calls as there are attributes. The individual calls generate a lot of network traffic and affects severely the system performance.

The solution to this problem is to use a plain java classes called Value Objects or Transfer Objects which encapsulate the bulk business data. A single method call is used to send and retrieve the Transfer Object / Value Obects. When the client requests the enterprise bean for the business data, the enterprise bean can construct the Transfer Object, populate it with its attribute values, and pass it by value to the client.

When an enterprise bean uses a Transfer Object / Value Obects, the client makes a single remote method invocation to the enterprise bean to request the Transfer Object / Value Obects instead of numerous remote method calls to get individual attribute values. The enterprise bean then constructs a new Transfer Object instance, copies values into the object and returns it to the client. The client receives the Transfer Object / Value Obects and can then invoke accessor or getter methods on the Transfer Object to get the individual attribute values from the Transfer Object. The implementation of the Transfer Object / Value Obectsmay be such that it makes all attributes public. Because the Transfer Object / Value Obects is passed by value to the client, all calls to the Transfer Object / Value Obects instance are local calls instead of remote method invocations.

A Transfer object / value object is a plain serializable Java class that represents a snapshot of some server side data, as in the following code example:

The responsibilities of the three components participating in this patterns are :

Client
This represents the client of the enterprise bean. The client can be an end-user application, like jsp, servlets or a java applet, as in the case of a rich client application that has been designed to directly access the enterprise beans. The client can be Business Delegates or a different BusinessObject.

Business Object
The Business Object represents a role in this pattern that can be fulfilled by a session bean, an entity bean, or a Data Access Object (DAO). The BusinessObject is responsible for creating the Transfer Object and returning it to the client upon request. The Business Object may also receive data from the client in the form of a Transfer Object / Value Obects and use that data to perform an update.

Transfer Object / Value Objects
The Transfer Object / Value Obects is an arbitrary serializable Java object referred to as a Transfer Object / Value Obects. Transfer Object / Value Obects has all the business values required by the client. A Transfer Object / Value Obects class may provide a constructor that accepts all the required attributes to create the Transfer Object / Value Obects. The constructor may accept all entity bean attribute values that the Transfer Object / Value Obects is designed to hold. Typically, the members in the Transfer Object / Value Obects are defined as public, thus eliminating the need for get and set methods. If some protection is necessary, then the members could be defined as protected or private, and methods are provided to get the values. Transfer Objects / Value Obects can be mutable or immutabel depending on whether the application wants to allow updates to the Transfer Objects / Value Obects