Types of Session Beans

Stateless Session Beans

• have no internal state
• since they do not have any states, they need not be passivated
• instances can be pooled to service multiple clients

Stateful Session Beans

• have internal state
• need to handle activation and passivation
• an instance of stateful bean is dedicated to the client that created it (i.e. not shared with other clients)
• may survive client session - a persistant handle to the bean may be obtained, saved at the client side and later (possibly when a client is started next time) converted back to the reference to the original session bean