The process of transferring an enterprise bean from memory to secondary storage. See activation.

It is a useful, memory-saving technique for multiprogrammed timesharing systems. A Reentrant Procedure is one in which multiple users can share a single copy of a program during the same period. Reentrancy has 2 key aspects: The program code cannot modify itself, and the local data for each user process must be stored separately. Thus, the permanent part is the code, and the temporary part is the pointer back to the calling program and local variables used by that program. Each execution instance is called activation. It executes the code in the permanent part, but has its own copy of local variables/parameters. The temporary part associated with each activation is the activation record. Generally, the activation record is kept on the stack.

RMI and CORBA are both distributed object technologies that support the creation, activation, and invocation of objects.CORBA supports a language-independent approach to developing and deploying distributed objects. RMI is a Java-specific approach.