Question - What is Session Bean?
Answer -
A session bean is a non-persistent object that implements some business logic running on the server. One way to think of a session object is as a logical extension of the client program that runs on the server.
Session beans are used to manage the interactions of entity and other session beans,access resources, and generally perform tasks on behalf of the client.
There are two basic kinds of session bean: stateless and stateful.
Stateless session beans are made up of business methods that behave like procedures; they operate only on the arguments passed to them when they are invoked. Stateless beans are called stateless because they are transient; they do not maintain business state between method invocations.Each invocation of a stateless business method is independent from previous invocations. Because stateless session beans are stateless, they are easier for the EJB container to manage, so they tend to process requests faster and use less resources.
Stateful session beans encapsulate business logic and state specific to a client. Stateful beans are called “stateful” because they do maintain business state between method invocations, held in memory and not persistent. Unlike stateless session beans, clients do not share stateful beans. When a client creates a stateful bean, that bean instance is dedicated to service only that client. This makes it possible to maintain conversational state, which is business state that can be shared by methods in the same stateful bean.