Persistent Anemic Object was a best practice, now (EJB 3) it is almost an antipattern 📎
The PAO is just a very simple persistent structure which can be easily generated (and overwritten) from the database. It consists mainly of accessors (getters/setters) and the state - almost no methods. Because it does not contains any business logic, it can be easily generated from a database. Also the checked-in sample is generated with netbeans 5.5.1 wizzard - a typical PAO. The PAO could be a best practice in procedural SOA-world, where the persistence access is often designed as service as well as the business logic. But the SOA-way is not always easy to build and cheap to maintain :-).