title: java beans: difference between persistent field and persistent property?
body: <p>I got the impression that if we use persistent fields, there is no need for getter methods since the entity manager references the instance variables directly. However, when I removed the getter and setter methods from an entity to have persistent fields, the values for the corresponding instance variable was not retrieved from the database!</p>
  
  <p>Does that mean we must have getter and setter methods even though we have persistent fields?</p>