The disclosure is directed to a new software component, an enterprise application server component such as an enterprise bean, called a "functional bean," which models a business method, and accords transactional persistence. The functional bean can be developed as a derived object from an enterprise bean class, and can call other beans to execute a transaction.A client initiates a transaction by requesting a container using an EJBObject of an appropriate functional bean type. A Service Manager bean handles an appropriate instance of a functional bean. After the Service Manager creates and returns the requested handle to the client, the client thereafter can access the functional bean directly. In this way, transactional awareness to the client is achieved.In a second embodiment, the Service Manager is implemented as a stateless session bean, and other functional beans are implemented as entity beans.