Stateful Session Beans

The state of an object consists of the values of its instance variables. In a stateful session bean, the instance variables represent the state of a unique client/bean session. Because the client interacts (“talks”) with its bean, this state is often called the conversational state.

As its name suggests, a session bean is similar to an interactive session. A session bean is not shared; it can have only one client, in the same way that an interactive session can have only one user. When the client terminates, its session bean appears to terminate and is no longer associated with the client.

The state is retained for the duration of the client/bean session. If the client removes the bean, the session ends and the state disappears. This transient nature of the state is not a problem, however, because when the conversation between the client and the bean ends, there is no need to retain the state.