Is it possible to use a CMP entity bean to access a database view without the bean attempting to persist itself? I have tried to do this in JBoss 2.4.3, but any call to a method defined in the remote interface for the bean results in the container attempting to persist the bean.
In a word, no, you cannot use a CMP without "persistence" - they were designed solely for persistence. If you want to use an EntityBean and control the when the data is loaded/stored, you'll need to use a BMP EntityBean.