A passivation/activation framework for custom session-specific data

In order to improve performance and preserve a stateful notion while utilizing a stateless protocol (that is, HTTP) the ADF Business Components framework implements the concept of application module pooling. This is a technique of maintaining a limited number of application modules, the exact number specified by configuration, in a pool, which are preserved across multiple user requests for the same HTTP session. If an application module instance for a session already exists in the application module pool, it gets reused. When all available application modules in the pool have been associated with specific sessions, an application module already linked with a particular session must be freed. This requires that the data associated with the application module is saved.

The process of saving the information associated with the specific application module is called passivation. The information is stored in a passivation store...