Enthuware

May be it's a good idea to add following points to explanation:

ejb 3.1 Spec 4.2.1Instance Passivation and Conversational State
•A reference to a container-managed EntityManager object, even if it is not serializable.
•A reference to an EntityManagerFactory object obtained via injection or JNDI lookup, even if it is not serializable.
•A reference to a javax.ejb.Timer object.


and regarding a sentence in the explanation:
"The last bulleted item covers cases such as storing Collections of component interfaces in the conversational state."

You didn't put any bullets to the points.
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I have one small doubt... This might be very silly but it's confusing me
When you passivate a javax.ejb.Timer object, is it going to harm the scheduled timers? Just the reference object is going to be passivated right? I guess that scheduled timers are maintained separately by container.... I am right?

Thanks,
Prakash Yaji

Yes, only the reference object is passivated. The timers are maintained separately. As per Section 18.2:

Timers survive container crashes, server shutdown, and the activation/passivation and load/store cycles of the enterprise beans that are registered with them.

Thank you for your suggestion. This has now been added.
Paul.

Thank you for your clarification!

Regarding to the timer in activation/passivation of a stateful bean, a timer has not been implemented in any stateful bean yet. Even though the specification says a timer will be serialized / deserialized during activation/passivation, a timer has not been used with a stateful bean.

good point himaiMinh