What is the difference between stateful and stateless session beans in J2EE?

What is the difference between stateful and stateless session beans in J2EE?

In J2EE, stateful and stateless session beans are two types of enterprise beans used to manage the session in an application. The key difference between them lies in how they handle client sessions and persist data.

Stateful Session Beans:

A stateful session bean maintains the conversational state of a client across multiple method invocations. It retains the data related to a specific client for the duration of the session. This allows for specific user interactions to be stored and reused throughout the session.

Stateless Session Beans:

In contrast, a stateless session bean does not maintain client state between method invocations. Each method call is independent, and the bean does not store any client-specific data. This makes stateless beans more lightweight and scalable, as they can be pooled and reused by multiple clients.

Focus Keyword: Stateful and Stateless Session Beans

In summary, the main difference between stateful and stateless session beans in J2EE is the way they manage client sessions and persist data. Stateful beans retain client state across method invocations, while stateless beans do not store client-specific information between calls.