So, you are writing a business object. A good design principle is to disassociate your business object from the client, so it matters not the slightest whether that client is a browser,
servlet,
Struts Action class, Swing class,
EJB or whatever. The business delegate pattern is used in this scenario.
Your business object has to access some persistant store, perhaps a file or a database. The implementation of that store should be transparent to the business object, so the Data Access Object pattern can be used.
In summary, your design can look like this.
Client --> Business Delegate --> Business Object --> DAO --> Store
Note that there is not necessarily one right solution, but I believe that you won't be far wrong if you did something as outlined above.