BlazeDS and Stateful EJB3

Question

I have been searching with no luck for a way to use stateful beans with blazeds.  The BlazeDS developer guide says its possible but I'm not sure how to do it.  My previous attempts have ended up with a new stateful bean being created on the server everytime my flex application makes a call on the remoteobject.  A step-by-step guide would be nice.

Answer 1

I have figured this out on my own.  Ill post what I did in case anyone else was having the same problem as me.
1. Create a POJO in the WEB-INF/classes directory.  This class will be a facade (wrapper) class for your stateful bean.  In this class, define a field to be of type "local interface for bean".  In the constructor call a method that will perform a JNDI lookup of the stateful bean and assign the result to the field variable.  Now implement methods that wrap bean methods and call the bean methods using the stateful bean field.
package com.your.domain.facades;
import com.your.domain.beans.MySessionLocal;
import java.util.HashMap;
import java.util.logging.Level;
import java.util.logging.Logger;
import javax.naming.Context;
import javax.naming.InitialContext;
import javax.naming.NamingException;
public class MySessionFacade {
    private MySessionLocal mySession;
    public MySessionFacade() {
        lookupMySessionBean();
    private void lookupMySessionBean() {
        try {
            Context c = new InitialContext();
            mySession = (MySessionLocal) c.lookup("java:comp/env/MySessionBean");
        } catch (NamingException ne) {
            Logger.getLogger(getClass().getName()).log(Level.SEVERE, "exception caught", ne);
            throw new RuntimeException(ne);
    //HashMap is converted to a generic object in Flex
    public HashMap<String, String> myBeanMethod1( HashMap<String, String> param ) {
        return mySession.myBeanMethod1( param );
2. Add an ejb-ref to the web.xml file in WEB-INF
<ejb-local-ref>
        <ejb-ref-name>MySessionBean</ejb-ref-name>
        <ejb-ref-type>Session</ejb-ref-type>
        <local>com.your.domain.beans.MySessionLocal</local>
</ejb-local-ref>
3. Add a destination in the remoting-config.xml file in the WEB-INF/flex directory.  The scope should be "session" if the state is to be maintained for individual clients and "application" if all clients should share the same state.
<destination id="MyService" channels="my-amf" >
    <properties>
          <source>com.your.domain.facades.MySessionFacade</source>
          <scope>session</scope>
     </properties>
</destination>
4.  Create a RemoteObject in your flex application that uses this destination.
<mx:RemoteObject id="myService" destination="MyService" showBusyCursor="true" result="resultHandler( event )" fault="faultHandler( event )" />
Now when the RemoteObject is used, flex will create an instance of MySessionFacade and use the field "mySession" to invoke methods on the stateful bean.  Since the scope is "session" or "application", flex only creates one instance of MySessionFacade.  Since the lookup is only performed on instantiation, and the object is instantiated only once, this ensures you will get the same stateful bean instance with each invocation on the facade class.
I am sure there is a better way to do this.  Possibly using a ServiceLocator pattern and cacheing.  If anyone can improve this code, please post it.