In JSF, there is the concept of
managed beans. Managed beans are simply beans that are constructed by the JSF framework instead of by explicit program logic. To make that happen, you declare them - plus any initialization information for them - in the faces-config file.
One of the things you declare for a managed bean is its scope. Scope is actually a basic
JSP bean concept and comes in 4 flavors: application, session, request, and page, but page scope is not meaningful in basic JSF, due to the way it operates. It sounds like you want an application-scope bean, but the default, I believe, is request scope. In request scope, the bean is created and destroyed each time you send a request to the server (NOT when you enter and leave a page, which may entail multiple requests).