The term was coined while Rebecca Parsons, Josh MacKenzie and I were preparing for a talk at a conference in September 2000. In the talk we were pointing out the many benefits of encoding business logic into regular java objects rather than using Entity Beans. We wondered why people were so against using regular objects in their systems and concluded that it was because simple objects lacked a fancy name. So we gave them one, and it''s caught on very nicely.
POJO, or Plain Old Java Object, is a normal Java object class (that is, not a JavaBean, EntityBean etc.) and does not serve any other special role nor does it implement any special interfaces of any of the Java frameworks. This term was coined by Martin Fowler, Rebbecca Parsons and Josh MacKenzie who believed that by creating the acronym POJO, such objects would have a "fancy name", thereby convincing people that they were worthy of use.