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What Is a Session Bean?

A session bean represents a single client inside the Application Server. To access an application that is deployed on the server, the client invokes the session bean's methods. The session bean performs work for its client, shielding the client from complexity by executing business tasks inside the server.

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. Like an interactive session, a session bean is not persistent. (That is, its data is not saved to a database.) When the client terminates, its session bean appears to terminate and is no longer associated with the client.

For code samples, see Chapter 25.

State Management Modes

There are two types of session beans: stateless and stateful.

Stateless Session Beans

A stateless session bean does not maintain a conversational state for the client. When a client invokes the method of a stateless bean, the bean's instance variables may contain a state, but only for the duration of the invocation. When the method is finished, the state is no longer retained. Except during method invocation, all instances of a stateless bean are equivalent, allowing the EJB container to assign an instance to any client.

Because stateless session beans can support multiple clients, they can offer better scalability for applications that require large numbers of clients. Typically, an application requires fewer stateless session beans than stateful session beans to support the same number of clients.

At times, the EJB container may write a stateful session bean to secondary storage. However, stateless session beans are never written to secondary storage. Therefore, stateless beans may offer better performance than stateful beans.

A stateless session bean can implement a Web service, but other types of enterprise beans cannot.

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.

The state is retained for the duration of the client-bean session. If the client removes the bean or terminates, 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.

When to Use Session Beans

In general, you should use a session bean if the following circumstances hold:

Stateful session beans are appropriate if any of the following conditions are true:

To improve performance, you might choose a stateless session bean if it has any of these traits:

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