Howto: portable bind, lookup remote + local beans (EJB3) to JNDI with WL 10

Question

I struggle writing portable ejb3 applications with weblogic.
I have a JEE5 (EJB3) application using the standard and it works fine on JBoss and WebSphere.
Porting it to Weblogic (10.0) there are quite a lot of problems, mainly
in the area of JNDI lookups of EJBs.
So the issue is how to configure the JNDI-Names of local and remote beans (EJB3!)
in a portable way with Weblogic without making the application unportable.
The biggest problem is caused by the fact, that WL 10 does not bind the EJBs
to the JNDI-tree by default. The bound name would not really be important (JBoss and WebSphere
come up with a value that can easily be used for a generic lookup). Just any binding
would be fine.
So there has to be some extra step in order to get WL 10 binding a remote or local
bean into the JNDI tree. Unfortunately none of them works/is acceptable in an portable JEE app.
Idea1: Using the "mappedName" attribute (of @Stateless, @Stateful)
Well, this one is not portable as the documentation states:
[http://edocs.bea.com/wls/docs100/ejb30/annotations.html#wp1417411|http://edocs.bea.com/wls/docs100/ejb30/annotations.html#wp1417411]
Idea2: Using @weblogic.ejbgen.JndiName
Using weblogic's annotation JndiName also doesn't bind the bean to the given names:
@Stateless
@weblogic.ejbgen.JndiName(local="myapp/XBean/local",remote="myapp/XBean/remote")
public class XBean implements XLocal {
Besides this, that code would not be portable (as nobody wants an weblogic.jar within another application server).
Idea3: Using weblogic-ejb-jar.xml
Mapping a bean using the weblogic-ejb-jar.xml below, also doesn't work.
The bean is not bound to the given name "myapp/XBean/remote":
Exception in thread "main" javax.naming.NameNotFoundException:
Unable to resolve 'myapp.XBean.remote'. Resolved 'myapp.XBean' [Root exception is javax.naming.NameNotFoundException: Unable to resolve 'myapp.XBean.remote'. Resolved 'myapp.XBean']; remaining name 'remote'
Looking at the JNDI tree, there is "something" bound to "myapp.XBean", but it is not the bean.
Doing a lookup with this name ("myapp/XBean" or "myapp.XBean"), gives this:
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.ClassCastException: weblogic.jndi.internal.WLContextImpl cannot be cast to test.server.XRemote
     at test.client.Client.main(Client.java:14)
Question 1) What is the preferred way to bind and lookup a remote bean in Weblogic 10?
Again: the goal is to use pure EJB3.
Question 2) What is the preferred way to bind and lookup a local bean in WL 10?
This lookup has to be done on the server in some "unmanaged" classes
where injection doesn't work.
If there is an unportable way to bind a local bean to jndi, it might do for the time.
The important thing would be, that there is no weblogic specific code within the application.
So, solving it using weblogic-xml files would be best.
This declaration
<local-jndi-name>myapp/XBean/local</local-jndi-name>
will come up with the same problems, I guess.
Here's the code. We want the local interface extending the remote interface,
so that the local beans can do all what the remote beans can do too.
XRemote.java
package test.server;
import javax.ejb.Remote;
@Remote
public interface XRemote {
String JNDI_NAME = "myapp/XBean/remote";
void doXRemote();
XLocal.java
package test.server;
import javax.ejb.Local;
@Local
public interface XLocal extends XRemote {
String JNDI_NAME = "myapp/XBean/local";
void doXLocal();
XBean.java
package test.server;
import javax.ejb.Stateless;
@Stateless
public class XBean implements XLocal {
@Override
public void doXLocal() {
System.out.println("doXLocal() called");
@Override
public void doXRemote() {
System.out.println("doXRemote() called");
weblogic-ejb-jar.xml
<weblogic-ejb-jar
xmlns="http://www.bea.com/ns/weblogic/10.0"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.bea.com/ns/weblogic/10.0 http://www.bea.com/ns/weblogic/10.0/weblogic-ejb-jar.xsd">
<weblogic-enterprise-bean>
<ejb-name>XBean</ejb-name>
<jndi-name>myapp/XBean/remote</jndi-name>
</weblogic-enterprise-bean>
</weblogic-ejb-jar>
Client.java
package test.client;
import java.util.Properties;
import javax.naming.Context;
import javax.naming.InitialContext;
import javax.naming.NamingException;
import test.server.XRemote;
public class Client {
public static void main(String[] args) throws NamingException {
InitialContext context = getInitialContext();
XRemote xRemote = (XRemote) context.lookup(XRemote.JNDI_NAME);
xRemote.doXRemote();
private static InitialContext getInitialContext() throws NamingException {
Properties properties = new Properties();
properties.put(Context.PROVIDER_URL, "t3://localhost:7001");
properties.put(Context.INITIAL_CONTEXT_FACTORY,
"weblogic.jndi.WLInitialContextFactory");
properties.put(Context.SECURITY_PRINCIPAL, "weblogic");
properties.put(Context.SECURITY_CREDENTIALS, "weblogic");
return new InitialContext(properties);
}

Answer 1

Hi,
about how to specify jndi name of remote ejb, please refer to this link: http://forums.oracle.com/forums/thread.jspa?threadID=800314&tstart=1
please note @JNDIName isn't an EJBGen annotation. its package name is weblogic.javaee.
So far, based on the EJB spec, local ejb will not be bound to global JNDI. EJB3.1 specification is trying to specify the portable JNDI names including local EJBs, but it isn't published yet.
local EJB is used within one application and ejb reference is used to lookup the local EJB. please refer to EJB specification about how to declare an EJB local reference. once it is declared, it can be looked up from the java:comp\env JNDI namespace.
But, if the local client of the EJB isn't a JavaEE component, there won't be any declaration of ejb-local-ref. You may want to try remote access to the EJB from the non-JavaEE client.