More EJB questions

Our EJB project is moving forward.. My sceptisism is growing... Some questionable points:

Session beans is where most, if not all our business logic goes. But session beans are nut pure java classes. They are based on some arcitectural ideas, which are not obviuosly good:

1. Communication with RMI and serialized java objects. This is probably a bad idea in most cases, a solution that is not only java specific but also has problems with different java versions. Basically it is based on that both sides have the same java classes. And then there is
2. Putting your logic in separate threads. A good idea if your session beans work with a large number of java clients, but probably a bad idea if your clients are servlets or message driven beans. In that case it will give you more thread handling overhead and little gain.

Entity beans have disappeared, instead we have got the new EntityManager. This of course means much faster development, but what is the cost? In my opinion the Data Access Object pattern is a good one, since it means that you have all your database access for one object in one place. With the EnityManager you can easily end up with SQL statements scattered all over your application. Where did the object orientation go?

Another point is constructions like this:

customer.getOrders().add(new Order(.....))

this would mean that to add a new order, you first fetch all existing orders from a customer before adding a new one. A framework that encourages this kind of solutions is not a good one.