Section 4.3.10.1 of EJB3 Spec: If the bean is a stateful session bean and the client has used one of the create<METHOD> methods defined in the session bean’s home or local home interface to create the bean, the container then calls the instance’s initialization method whose signature matches the signature of the create<METHOD> invoked by the client, passing to the method the input parameters sent from the client. If the bean class was written to the EJB 3.0 API, and has been adapted for use with an earlier client view, this initialization method is a matching Init method, as designated by use of the Init annotation, or init-method deployment descriptor element[12]. If the bean class was written to the EJB 2.1 or earlier API, this initialization method is a matching ejbCreate<METHOD> method, as described in Section 4.6.4.