The state factory should return an empty, uninitialized object. The platform will invoke the state factory during application initialization with a null argument to determine the type of the application's root state, and will subsequently invoke the state object factory on receipt of a MessageView when state has not already been created for the application. The application should not store a reference to the application state that it returns ... it is the job of the platform to manage the state tree once it has been created by either passing the state root into an EventHandler or returning it via a call to AepEngine.getApplicationState(final MessageView message)