Stateless vs Stateful Session Beans in J2EE

Stateless and stateful session beans are both components used in the J2EE framework for managing sessions in enterprise applications. The main difference between them lies in how they handle client sessions.

Stateless Session Beans

Stateless session beans do not maintain conversational state for a specific client across method invocations. This means that each method call is independent and does not rely on any previous method calls. Stateless session beans are designed for performance and scalability, as they can be shared among multiple clients without the need for maintaining client-specific states.

Stateful Session Beans

On the other hand, stateful session beans maintain conversational state for a specific client across multiple method invocations. This allows the bean to hold client-specific data throughout the session, making it suitable for scenarios where client state needs to be maintained between interactions with the bean. However, this can impact performance and scalability as each client requires its own instance of the stateful session bean.

In conclusion, the choice between stateless and stateful session beans depends on the specific requirements of the application. Stateless beans are more lightweight and scalable, while stateful beans are more suitable for maintaining client-specific states.