Yes! That's exactly what it means!
On page 71 in the EJB 2.0 spec, you have a whole list of things that will be passivated automatically by the Container, without you worrying about it...
Here's a little summary, for example -- at the end of ejbPassivate(), your non-transient instance variables MUST be one of the following:
* null
* Serializable object
* a bean's Remote component interface
* a bean's Remote home interface
* a bean's local component interface
* a bean's local home interface
* a reference to a SessionContext
* a reference to the environment naming context (
java:comp/env)
* a reference to a UserTransaction
* a reference to a DataSource (or other resource manager connection factory)
But... you must close other non-serializable resources like a
JDBC connection.
And don't forget the warning about transient -- of course
you should mark transient variables 'transient', but you should ALSO set them to null (or primitives to default values) before passivation, since there is no guarantee about how those variables will come back in activation (as opposed to pure Serialization, which guarantees that transient variables will come back with default values for that type).
cheers,
Kathy
