Session beans

• Used to model processes

• Typically have no direct interaction with a database.  Such interaction would be achieved by using the services of an entity bean.

• May be stateful or stateless

  • Stateful beans maintain state across method calls, but the state is not maintained in a database

  • Stateless beans are often used to provide general functions such as validations or calculations

  • Stateless beans provide better performance, as a given method request may be serviced by any instance of the bean

• Often used to provide an interface between the presentation layer and database layer of an application