Beans

The term "beans" indicates that we are dealing with objects, which are impenetrable to some degree. It means more or less the same thing as "black box" in this setting (or perhaps "brown box"). We can deal with the bean only through its outside interface.

A very important thing to understand about beans as used in this context, is that it is very likely that a bean is sent from one machine to another as the argument that corresponds to a parameter of a remote method, that is of a method of an object on that remote machine.

This is unusual behavior for languages other than Java, and in fact the Corba specification was extended to allow for this behavior so that it could continue to be an important part of the EJB world.