Need help with null vs. empty

[ftg314159]

This will probably be a newbie question, but it wasn't to do with installation and configuration, so...

JBoss 3.0.0.....

I have an entity bean and a facade stateless session bean (my first of either). The entity bean's CMP fields are a bunch of ArrayLists. The facade successfully creates a new instance of the entity, and the entity has explicit definitions of its ArrayList instance variables initializing them to new ArrayList(). Yet when I retrieve the new entity instance, the instance variables as returned by the getter methods are null, and not empty ArrayLists.

Is this expected behavior ?

[rgjawanda]

I have the same problem.
JBOSS 3
nulls passed back in my get methods.
I know the data is being found from the database because in my Primary Key Class I print out the values and they are filled in.