I am using the Staff Library built on top of the Apache Axis2c library to implement a service, which I intend to be stateless.
As I understand it, whether a service is stateful or not (i.e. "whether the interaction of client and server involves the server keeping track of the interaction-specific data as each subsequent interaction may depend upon the outcome of the previous interaction" or not) is something that will depend on the implementation of the service architecture.
As I understand it, it is perfectly possible for me to use Staff to create a stateless service. Why then does the 'features' page of staff explicitly mention "stateful Web services implementation"? Does it even make sense for the Staff library to do that?
Maybe it's not truly stateful.
The idea why it's called "stateful" is: server stores service instances per session. Your service can store local data as class properties and you will have the same data when you working within the session.
When you log in and use sessionId provided by Login service, server will create(lazily) service instances bound to this sessionId. So for two different sessions you will have two service instances with different values of properties. This may be very useful if you working with some large objects which can't be initialized and destroyed on each call, for example the geodesic information systems.
Stateless Web service frameworks usually create service instances per client call and nothing can be stored locally, in exception you use some global mechanism like shared memory or DBMS and pass some id to distinguish one client to another.