states of stateful session bean

[Timber Lee]

Hi, I have some questions about how to classify state fields of stateful session bean, please clear it for me or recommend some articles for me, thank in dvance.
how many type of state fields are in stateful session bean? what need to be serialized when passivating ?

[Shankar Ranganathan]

Non Transient fields will be passivated. You can download ejb1.1 specification from sun site.

[Timber Lee]

what are non-transient and non-serializable fields?

[Rama Raghavan]

Kinda lost with your question(s), BUT -
If you want to know about different states of the stateful session bean lifecycle, then "Mastering EJB" by Ed Roman is your best resource.

[Thomas Hofmann]

what are non-transient and non-serializable fields?

A transient instance variable in SFSB can be declared as follows:

 private transient int i; 

In this case the state of

 i 

wouldn't be wirtten to disk if the SFSB is poing to be passivated.
Only serializable variables can be passivated (written to disk). All basic Java types (int, short, boolean) and all custom classes that implement the marker interface

java.io.Serializable

are serializable.
Thomas