"gavin.king(a)jboss.com" wrote : In practice, its a total disaster unless you are using something like jBPM, in which case you don't need to even think about it. Sounds reasonable. I probably need more experience in complex business processes to realize that with my skin. Let's assume we are using jBPM. One question is unanswered, I will ask it again. When we expose stateful bean as Seam component with scope = business process, it's persistence may be longer than session and continue across sessions/users , right ? If we don't need this object when process ends, then we don't need it to be entity bean and stay in database afterwards. We don't care how Seam/jBPM saves state in context (maybe using the same database), maps table names, fields, etc. Is it good practice to use process-wide stateful bean in such manner, or Entity bean is still recommended ? View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4058922#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...