JavaBeans are very simillar to Perl Modules. They are small pieces of code that are maintained separately and usually serve a simple purpose. For example, say I have a web page that accesses a database. I can put all the specifics for that database conection in a bean. Now my web page can use JSP to run that code without having to know/expose the details of the database connection to anyone. You can accomplish the same goal by writing your own modules.