A few more details regarding the ConcurrentAccessException: as per the EJB spec, access to SLSB is synchronized by the app. server. However, this is not the case with SFSB. The burden of making sure that the SFSB is not accessed concurrently is on the application developer’s shoulders.
Why? Well, synchronization of SLSB is only necessary at the instance-level. That is, each particular instance of the SLSB is synchronized, but you may have multiple instances in a pool or on different node in a cluster, and concurrent requests on different instances is not a problem. This is unfortunately not so easy with SFSB because of passivation/activation of instances and replication across the cluster. This is why the spec doesn’t enforce this. Have a look at this dicussion if you are interested in the topic.
This means that using SFSB from servlet is complicated. A user with multiple windows from the same session, or reloading page before the rendering finished can lead to concurrent access. Each access to the EJB that is done in a servlet needs theoretically to be synchronized on the bean itself. What I did was to to create an InvocationHandler to synchronize all invocations on the particular EJB instance:
public class SynchronizationHandler implements InvocationHandler {
private Object target; // the EJB
public SynchronizationHandler( Object bean )
{
target = bean;
}
public Object invoke(Object proxy, Method method, Object[] args) throws Throwable
{
synchronized( target )
{
// invoke method to the target EJB
}
}
}
Then, right after you obtain the remote reference to the EJB, you wrap it with the SynchronizationHandler. This way you are sure that this particular instance will not be accessed concurrently from your app (as long as it runs in only one JVM). You can also write a regular wrapper class which synchronizes all the methods of the bean.
My conclusion is nevertheless: use SLSB whenever possible.
EDIT:
This answer reflects the EJB 3.0 specs (section 4.3.13):
Clients are not allowed to make concurrent calls to a stateful session
object. If a client-invoked business method is in progress on an
instance when another client-invoked call, from the same or different
client, arrives at the same instance of a stateful session bean class,
if the second client is a client of the bean’s business interface, the
concurrent invocation may result in the second client receiving the
javax.ejb.ConcurrentAccessException
Such restrictions have been removed in EJB 3.1 (section 4.3.13):
By default, clients are allowed to make concurrent calls to a stateful
session object and the container is required to serialize such
concurrent requests.[…]
The Bean Developer may optionally specify that concurrent client
requests to a stateful session bean are prohibited. This is done using
the @AccessTimeout annotation or access-timeout deployment descriptor
element with a value of 0. In this case, if a client-invoked business
method is in progress on an instance when another client-invoked call,
from the same or different client, arrives at the same instance of a
stateful session bean, if the second client is a client of the bean’s
business interface or no-interface view, the concurrent invocation
must result in the second client receiving a
javax.ejb.ConcurrentAccessException