Specifying a Stateful Session Bean

Specifying a stateful Session bean is similar to specifying a stateless Session bean. The remote interface defines access to the bean by remote clients, and every method of the remote interface must throw an RemoteException. The primary difference (from a specification viewpoint) is that there can be multiple create() methods in the home interface.

You will recall that a stateless Session bean allows only for a single create() method in the home interface, and this corresponds to the ejbCreate() method of the bean itself. For a stateful Session bean, the create() method can be overloaded, so that the stateful bean can be given some initial state. From the client's viewpoint, this is somewhat analogous to invoking a constructor on the bean.