Stateless and Stateful Enterprise Java Beans

Stateless Session Beans (SLSB) are not tied to one client and there is no guarantee for one client to get the same instance with each method invocation (some containers may create and destroy beans with each method invocation session, this is an implementation-specific decision, but instances are typically pooled - and I don't mention clustered environments). In other words, although stateless beans may have instance variables, these fields are not specific to one client, so don't rely on them between remote calls.

In contrast, Stateful Session Beans (SFSB) are dedicated to one client for their entire life, there is no swapping or pooling of instances (it may be evicted from memory after passivation to save resources but that's another story) and maintain conversational state. This means that the instance variables of the bean can keep data relative to the client between method invocations. And this makes possible to have interdependent method calls (changes made by one method affect subsequent method calls). Multi-step processes (a registration process, a shopping cart, a booking process...) are typical use cases for SFSB.

One more thing. If you are using SFSB, then you must avoid injecting them into classes that are multithreaded in nature, such as Servlets and JSF managed beans (you don't want it to be shared by all clients). If you want to use SFSB in your web application, then you need to perform a JNDI lookup and store the returned EJB instance in the HttpSession object for future activity. Something like that:

try {
    InitialContext ctx = new InitialContext();
    myStateful = (MyStateful)ctx.lookup("java:comp/env/MyStatefulBean");
    session.setAttribute("my_stateful", myStateful);
} catch (Exception e) {
    // exception handling
}

The important difference is not private member variables, but associating state with a particular user (think "shopping cart").

The stateful piece of stateful session bean is like the session in servlets. Stateful session beans allow your app to still have that session even if there isn't a web client. When the app server fetches a stateless session bean out of the object pool, it knows that it can be used to satisfy ANY request, because it's not associated with a particular user.

A stateful session bean has to be doled out to the user that got it in the first place, because their shopping cart info should be known only to them. The app server ensures that this is so. Imagine how popular your app would be if you could start shopping and then the app server gave your stateful session bean to me when I came along!

So your private data member is indeed "state", but it's not "shopping cart". Try to redo your (very good) example to make it so the incremented variable is associated with a particular user. Increment it, create a new user, and see if they can still see the incremented value. If done correctly, every user should see just their version of the counter.