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# Advantages and Disadvantages

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The EJB session bean facade architecture is a popular and effective compromise between the performance of persistent Java objects, and the benefits of EJB for standardized client development and server scalability. It offers the following advantages:

- Less overhead than an EJB entity bean application

  TopLink shares access to the project, descriptor, and login information across the beans in the application.

- Future compatibility with other servers

  This design isolates login and EJB server-specific information from the beans, which lets you migrate the application from one application server to another without major recoding or rebuilding.

- Shared read cache

  This design offers increased efficiency by providing a shared cache for reading objects.

The key disadvantage of this model is the need to transport the persistent model to the client. If the model involves complex object graphs in conjunction with indirection, this can present many challenges with inheritance, indirection, and relationships.

For more information about managing inheritance, indirection and relationships, see Mappings.