Stateless Session Bean Concepts

A stateless session bean is a lightweight version of a stateful session bean without the session-aware functionality. Because no state is maintained between a client application and a stateless session bean, the EJB-compliant container maintains an instance pool of stateless session beans. Any stateless session bean from the instance pool is used by the EJB container to service client application requests.

A stateless session bean can be used primarily for developing pure functionality or the business logic of the application. Stateless session beans are purely transactional in nature and can be used for embedding business logic that is reusable by different stateful session beans or client applications (see Figure 11.2).