Creating multiple stateful session beans from a java client. (EJB 3.0)

Question

I'm having difficulties with the following:
To access the ShoppingCartBean, I have to put the following annotation in my standalone java client:
@EJB
private static ShoppingCartRemote shoppingCartBean;
The static must be there, thus only one ShoppingCartBean will exist within my java client. But as the ShoppingCartBean is a stateful session bean, I want to be able to get different beans of the same type.
What is the correct way to do this in EJB 3.0?

Answer 1

Great question. Because Home interfaces have been removed for the EJB 3.0 simplified
API, stateful session bean creation happens as a side-effect of injection. However, the
same is true of EJB 3.0 business interface lookups. The easiest way to create additional
stateful session beans is to lookup the same dependency that was declared via your
@EJB annotation.
E.g.,
// Assuming the declaring class is pkg1.ShoppingCartClient.java
InitialContext ic = new InitialContext();
ShoppingCartRemote scr1 = (ShoppingCartRemote)
ic.lookup("java:comp/env/pkg1.ShoppingCartClient/shoppingCartBean");
Note that the name relative to java:comp/env is the default associated with your
@EJB annotation since the name() attribute wasn't used. Alternatively, you
could have used :
@EJB(name="scb") private static ShoppingCartRemote shoppingCartBean;
InitialContext ic = new InitialContext();
ShoppingCartRemote scr1 = (ShoppingCartRemote) ic.lookup("java:comp/env/scb");
Yet another alternative is to declare the @EJB at the class-level. This just defines
the dependency without any injection, which is fine if you want to create a bunch of
them via lookup anyway.
@EJB(name="scb", beanInterface=ShoppingCartRemote.class)
public class .... {