What makes a Java class an enterprise bean?
An enterprise bean is composed of many parts, not just a single class. Essentially, an enterprise bean is constructed with a bean class, remote interface, home interface and deployment descriptor. These constituents are discussed below. A bean class is the implementation class of the bean that defines its business, persistence, and passivation logic. The bean class implements either the javax.ejb.EntityBean or javax.ejb.SessionBean interface and runs inside the EJB container. Instances of the bean class service client request indirectly; instances of the bean class are not visible to the client. The remote interface defines the business methods that will be visible to the client’s that use the enterprise bean. The remote interface extends the javax.ejb.EJBObject interface and is implemented by a remote (distributed object) reference. Client applications interact with the enterprise bean through its remote interface.