Some entities have a set of attributes that are always used together.
Suppose that in total, a customer's contact information is composed of 15 individual attributes, each accessible by a corresponding getXXX method in CustomerEJB . This will incur heavy costs in network traffic and EJB container resource usage. It aggregates the contact information-related attributes of the CustomerEJB into an instance of ContactInformation . This instance, or value object , is then serialized and sent over the network to a requesting client, where the object is deserialized. Subsequent read accesses go through the value object rather than the remote entity object.