Stateful Session Beans

A Stateful session bean maintain the state of the conversation between the client and itself. When the client invokes a method on the bean the instance variables of the bean may contain a state but only for the duration of the invocation.

Stateful session bean will retain client specific state (session state) from one method invocation to the next, her bean instances are to be maintained for each client. A stateful session bean is an enterprise bean (EJB component) that acts as a server-side extension of the client that uses it. The stateful session bean is created by a client and will work for only that client until the client connection is dropped or the bean is explicitly removed.

A stateful session bean is an enterprise bean (EJB component) that acts as a server-side extension of the client that uses it. The stateful session bean is created by a client and will work for only that client until the client connection is dropped or the bean is explicitly removed. Stateful session beans are usually developed to act as agents for the client, managing the interaction of other beans and performing work on behalf of the client application.

The stateful session bean is EJB component that implements the javax.ejb.SessionBean interface and is deployed with the declarative attribute "stateful". Stateful session beans are called "stateful" because they maintain a conversational state with the client. In other words, they have state or instance fields that can be initialized and changed by the client with each method invocation. The bean can use the conversational state as it process business methods invoked by the client.