Here's another way to do it that feels like a workaround. The application scope bean is injected into a stateful session bean that is able to initialize the application bean's static list through the use of the EntityManager. You annotate the stateful session bean method initializing the list with @Create and when the stateful session bean is instantiated, this method checks a boolean in the application scope bean to see if the list already exists, if it doesn't you create the list. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4062152#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...