Conversational state (Java EE)

In Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE), the Conversational state are the field values of a session bean plus the transitive closure of the objects reachable from the bean's fields. The name "conversational" is used as in this state the client interacts with the bean - a stateless session bean does not do so. For example, while a Cart bean might contain a conversational state to communicate with the client about the contents of their cart, an Order bean might not as the invocation is not necessary. The transitive closure of a bean is defined in terms of the serialization protocol for the Java programming language, that is, the fields that would be stored by serializing the bean instance.