What is an Application Scoped Bean? I understand it to be a bean which will exist for the life of the application, but that doesn't appear to be the correct interpretation. I have an application which creates an application scoped bean on startup (eager=true) and then a session bean that tries to access the application scoped bean's objects (which are also application scoped). But when I try to access the application scoped bean from the session scoped bean, I get a null pointer exception. Here's excerpts from my code: Application Scoped Bean: @ManagedBean(eager=true) @ApplicationScoped public class Bean1 implements Serializable{ private static final long serialVersionUID = 12345L; protected ArrayList<App> apps; // construct apps so they are available for the session scoped bean // do time consuming stuff... // getters + setters Session Scoped Bean: @ManagedBean @SessionScoped public class Bean2 implements Serializable{ private static final long serialVersionUID = 123L; @Inject private Bean1 bean1; private ArrayList<App> apps = bean1.getApps(); // null pointer exception What appears to be happening is, Bean1 is created, does it's stuff, then is destroyed before Bean2 can access it. I was hoping using application scoped would keep Bean1 around until the container was shutdown, or the application was killed, but this doesn't appear to be the case.