A method is disclosed for partitioning a managed state for a Java based application. The application developer is allowed to associate individual entity beans with a particular state management type. Then, during execution, a plurality of state objects are provided, where each state object stores a state of a corresponding entity bean object within the memory address space of a Java server process. Further, each state object is associated with the state management type of the corresponding entity bean object. In this manner, state management is provided for each entity bean object based on the associated state management type using a corresponding state object. The state management type can be a memory replicated state management type, a disk replicated state management type, a non-replicated state manage type.