Enterprise bean life cycles

Enterprise beans go through different states throughout their life cycle. Each type of enterprise bean has different states. States specific to each type of enterprise bean are discussed in the following sections.

Stateful session bean life cycle

We can annotate methods in session beans so that they are automatically invoked by the Jakarta EE runtime at certain points in the bean’s life cycle. For example, we could have a method invoked right after the bean is created or right before it is destroyed.

Before explaining the annotations available to implement life cycle methods, a brief explanation of the session bean life cycle is in order. The life cycle of a stateful session bean is different from the life cycle of a stateless or singleton session bean.

A stateful session bean life cycle contains three states: Does Not Exist, Ready, and Passive, as illustrated in Figure 12.1.

Figure 12.1 – Stateful session...