The EAServer component life cycle is designed to:
Maximize sharing and reuse of server resources
Minimize the possibility that a client application can monopolize server resources
To achieve these goals, EAServer supports the concepts of component instance pooling and early deactivation.
Instance pooling allows a single component instance to service multiple clients. The component life cycle contains activation and deactivation steps: Activation binds an instance to an individual client; deactivation indicates that the instance is unbound. Instance pooling eliminates resource drain from repeated allocation of component instances.
Early deactivation allows a component’s methods to specify when deactivation occurs. Early deactivation prevents a client application from tying up the resources that are associated with a component instance and allows the instance to serve more clients in a given time frame. To achieve early deactivation, you can code or configure your component as described in “Supporting early deactivation in your component”.
A component that is deactivated after each method call and supports instance pooling is said to be a stateless component because the component’s state is reset across the boundary of a transaction and activation. Early deactivation and instance pooling promotes greater scalability by enabling an increasing number of clients to use a static number of instances. An application design based on stateless components offers the greatest scalability.
