The Life Cycle of a Stateless Session Bean

Because a stateless session bean is never passivated, its life cycle has only two stages: nonexistent and ready for the invocation of business methods. Figure 20–4 illustrates the stages of a stateless session bean.

Figure 20–4 Life Cycle of a Stateless Session Bean

The client initiates the life cycle by obtaining a reference to a stateless session bean. The container performs any dependency injection and then invokes the method annotated @PostConstruct, if any. The bean is now ready to have its business methods invoked by the client.

At the end of the life cycle, the EJB container calls the method annotated @PreDestroy, if any. The bean’s instance is then ready for garbage collection.