anonymous wrote : I assumed that because the init method has been annotated with a Factory annotation and the testVar component is initially null - that this would cause the init method (i.e. method annotated with the Factory annotation) to be invoked whenever one invokes any business method in the stateless session bean (in this case, testSLSBMethod in TestSLSBBean stateless session bean). This is your mistake. Factory methods are only called when something looks for testVar in a Seam context and it isn't already there. So if your JSF page tried to display #{testVar} or another componented tried a @In(value="testVar"), etc. Simply referencing the instance variable testVar in a method won't get the job done. The difference is between the notion of an instance variable and a *context* variable. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=3973803#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...