Sun Certified Enterprise Architect for J2EE™ Technology Study Guide

2.7. Stateless and Stateful Session Beans

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

Stateless Beans

Stateless session beans do not hold any conversational state for a client. However, this does not mean they cannot hold a state. Stateless session beans can hold a state, but the state is not guaranteed to be specific to the calling client. This means you can use stateless session beans to do almost anything in your application.

Stateful Session Beans

Stateful session beans give you the capability to hold a conversational state for a client. There are any number of ways to handle a conversational state in an enterprise application, but if the state needs to be close to the business logic, then it should be in a stateful session ...