Static vs Instance members in Stateless EJBs

Question

I have a stateless session bean which needs access to a factory class. Is it best to declare this factory class as a static or instance member in the SLSB? Am I correct in saying that, as SLSBs are reused, only one instance of the factory will be created per bean (when going with the instance member option), as opposed to one instance per request?

Answer 1

SLSB instances are pooled, and hence serve potentially many requests over their lifetime, so as you say instance variables are not recreated for each request.

The "natural" way for SLSB is to have each instance independent, no statics, no need for synchronisation between instances. Hence if it's possible I'd have a factory instance per SLSB instance.