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What this means is quite simply that stateless beans are shared. They do in fact have state as you can assign values to the variables, etc. in the bean instance. The only catch is there are a pool of identical instances and you are not guaranteed to get the exact same instance on every call so the state of whatever instance may or may not be useful to you. For each call, you get whatever instance happens to be available. This is identical to checking out a book from the library or renting a movie from the video store. You are essentially checking out or renting a new bean instance on each method call.

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