I am reading spring through its official documentation and at one place I came to a line that uses prototype scope for all stateful beans while singleton for stateless beans
From spring perspective
stateless beans: beans that are singleton and are initialized only once. The only state they have is a shared state. These beans are created while the ApplicationContext is being initialized. The SAME bean instance will be returned/injected during the lifetime of this ApplicationContext.
stateful beans: beans that can carry state (instance variables). These are created EVERY time an object is required (like using the "new" operator in java).
These are not EJB statfull/stateless session beans.