You are right, they are for pre and post operations.
For instance, if you have a transient (non-serializable) variable in your
EJB you can "clear it out" in the passivate() method prior to serialization of the bean to a file (which the container will do) and "set it back up" in the activate() method after the bean has been de-serialized.
Likewise in EJB 1.1 you can use the ejbLoad() and ejbStore() method to manage BMP fields in a BMP subclass of a CMP bean (stange but true -- read the spec...)
Kyle
------------------
Kyle Brown,
Author of
Enterprise Java (tm) Programming with IBM Websphere
See my homepage at
http://members.aol.com/kgb1001001 for other WebSphere information.