Answer to your first question why people still use version 1.1 There are many reasons for that 1.most of the time people don't want to come out from comfort level with existing version 2.and majorly for supporting existing project which is in older version (1.1)

I am a .net Developer and with best of my knowledge about java,beans are component which hold business logic and can be used as a supporting component for main executing programme and in .net this task is accomplished by assemblies ,which hold reusable business logic i hope this helps