Singleton Session Beans

A singleton session bean is instantiated once per application, and exists for the lifecycle of the application. Singleton session beans are designed for circumstances where a single enterprise bean instance is shared across and concurrently accessed by clients.

Singleton session beans offer similar functionality to stateless session beans, but differ from stateless session beans in that there is only one singleton session bean per application, as opposed to a pool of stateless session beans, any of which may respond to a client request. Like stateless session beans, singleton session beans can implement web service endpoints.

Singleton session beans maintain their state between client invocations, but are not required to maintain their state across server crashes or shutdowns.

Applications that use a singleton session bean may specify that the singleton should be instantiated upon application startup, which allows the singleton to perform initialization tasks for the application. The singleton may perform cleanup tasks on application shutdown as well, because the singleton will operate throughout the lifecycle of the application.