Hi Flemming
Welcome to JavaRanch.
While using Beans is an interesting design plan, I would be concerned with the fact that you will have different signatures on the methods you are providing remotely.
The way the instructions were written, I got the impression that they wanted a semi standard interface that could be used for automated
testing. Or to keep it in a business perspective, they wanted an interface that could be provided to another programmer writing a different application so that the other programmer could connect to your database server. This would not become far more problematic (to put it mildly) when you change the signatures.
In the new assignments they have been far more explicit in that they state that there will be automated testing, and they provide an interface that has to be coded to.
Just my 2 cents worth.
Regards, Andrew