EJB stateless session beans and stateful session bean

Question

I have gone through various books on stateful and stateless session bean and how they work. I want to know the real usage of these ejbs and advantages over using plain java

Answer 1

• Stateless session bean are lightweight: they do not store information about a specific user. They are usually used in a static way. For example a client ask for a product information will communicate with a stateless session bean. ("You want the price of product 'YXZ', here you go!")

• Stateful session bean however remember's the client information. They contains data about the user actions. For example, let's say a user go through a shopping cart. The steps will be stored in a stateful session bean (for example, user it at the payment step).

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You really need both type of session bean in any website. Unless you web site is so basic that anything can be done with stateless session bean (a read-only web site really).

Any web site that track a user through cookies, will need a stateful session bean. Be aware however that you can decide to put very little session information in a session bean and store that information in a database. But you still need some session management.