Oracle GlassFish Server 3.0.1 Application Development Guide

Extended Persistence Context

If a stateful session bean is passivated, its extended persistence context could be lost when the stateful session bean is activated. In this environment, it is safe to store an extended persistence context in a stateful session bean only if you can safely disable stateful session bean passivation altogether. This is possible, but trade-offs in memory utilization must be carefully examined before choosing this option.

It is safe to store a reference to an extended persistence context in an HttpSession.