Stateless Session Beans

A Stateless session beans are of equal value for all instances of the bean. Session bean will execute a client request and return a result without saving any client specific state. This means the container can assign any bean to any client, making it very scalable. Stateless session beans does not retain client specific state from one method invocation to the next.

Bean instance can be reassigned to serve a method invocation from another client once current method invocation is done. Value of instance variables of a bean instance is not preserved between calls. Container transparently reuses bean instances to serve different clients. Load-balancing & Failover is easier since no state needs to be preserved. High scalability since a client call can be Served by any EJB server in a clustered architecture.

A stateless session bean is an enterprise bean that provides a stateless service to the client. Conceptually, the business methods on a stateless session bean are similar to procedural applications or static methods; there is no instance state, so all the data needed to execute the method is provided by the method arguments. The stateless session bean is an EJB component that implements the javax.ejb.SessionBean interface and is deployed with the declarative attribute "stateless".

Stateless session beans are called "stateless" because they do not maintain conversational state specific to a client session. In other words, the instance fields in a stateless session bean do not maintain data relative to a client session. This makes stateless session beans very lightweight and fast, but also limits their behavior. Typically an application requires less number of stateless beans compared to stateful beans.