Extended Persistence Context in Stateful Session Beans

The Java Persistence Architecture, a part of the Enterprise JavaBeans 3.0 (EJB 3.0) specification, simplified the development of EJB applications using data persistence. A major simplification was the introduction of the EntityManager interface for accessing a database and creating, removing, or updating entities within a transaction. Entities are objects that represent data in a database. They are persistent in the sense that they exist even after the application that created them ends. To foster entity persistence an entity manager interacts with the persistence context, which the Java Persistence Architecture defines as: A set of managed entity instances in which for any persistent entity identity there is a unique entity instance. Within the persistence context, the entity instances and their lifecycle are managed by the entity manager.