The Lifecycle of a Stateless Session Bean

Because a stateless session bean is never passivated, its lifecycle has only two stages: nonexistent and ready for the invocation of business methods. Figure 14–4 illustrates the stages of a stateless session bean.

Figure 14–4 Lifecycle of a Stateless Session Bean

The EJB container typically creates and maintains a pool of stateless session beans, beginning the stateless session bean’s lifecycle. The container performs any dependency injection and then invokes the method annotated @PostConstruct, if it exists. The bean is now ready to have its business methods invoked by a client.

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