What is the difference between a JavaBean and a POJO?

DJphilomath picture DJphilomath · Sep 8, 2009 · Viewed 140.1k times · Source

I'm not sure about the difference. I'm using Hibernate and, in some books, they use JavaBean and POJO as an interchangeable term. I want to know if there is a difference, not just in the Hibernate context, but as general concepts.

Answer

Brian Agnew picture Brian Agnew · Sep 8, 2009

A JavaBean follows certain conventions. Getter/setter naming, having a public default constructor, being serialisable etc. See JavaBeans Conventions for more details.

A POJO (plain-old-Java-object) isn't rigorously defined. It's a Java object that doesn't have a requirement to implement a particular interface or derive from a particular base class, or make use of particular annotations in order to be compatible with a given framework, and can be any arbitrary (often relatively simple) Java object.