Using ManagedBeans differently?

Question

Hello, this is my first topic on this forum, my first topic about my JAVA activities also !
Sorry if my sentences have not a perfect English syntax or grammar, I'm not a English speaking person :)
Here we go :
My project consists of an Enterprise application, developed through NetBeans 6.7.1, using GlassFish 2.1 as my application server,...
I have my database and ejb working. I also have a war project containing some ManagedBeans and classic pages using them like :
        <h:form>
            <h:inputText value="#{testMB.testTmp.name}">
                <h:outputText value="name : "></h:outputText>
            </h:inputText>
            <h:commandButton value="add test" action="#{testMB.addTest}"/><br/>
         </h:form>This work very well, my test managedBean create and persist my test object into database...
Now what I'm trying to do is adding some ajax to my pages thanks to jQuery.
I've replaced this code by a simple html input and some JavaScript code.
I'm sending to ajax.jsp via a post request thanks to jQuery two parameters "action" wich has the value "addTest" and "testName" wich the value is the input value...
Here is the ajax.jsp code :
String action = request.getParameter("action");
if(action.equals("addTest")){
    TestMB testmb;
   testmb= new TestMB();
   testmb.createTestTmp(request.getParameter("testName"));
}and here is a part of the managedBean :
public class TestMB {
        @EJB
        MainSessionRemote  mainSessionBean;
  Test testTmp;
    public Test gettestTmp() {
        if(this.testTmp == null){
            this.testTmp = new  Test();
        return testTmp;
    public void createTestTmp(String str){
        this.testTmp.setName(str);
        this.addTest();
    public void settestTmp(Test tst) {
        this.testTmp = tst;
    public String addTest(){
        this.mainSessionBean.addTest(testTmp);
        settestTmp(null);
        return "ok";
    }...The problem while running the test :
org.apache.jasper.JasperException: java.lang.NullPointerException
Apparently the mainSessionBean is null...
Why in this case it doesn't work !?
I tried many alternatives, getting and manipulating data from a request and process them through the managed bean seams difficult, I didn't find examples of people trying to do this way. Is this way a good way !? I may have didnt get the concept of managed bean very well ...
Thanks for your time.

Answer 1

Those magical annotations like @EJB only work if the bean is created by the container, in this case by the JSF system.
This is not the way to do AJAX with JSF (as you have discovered). Find a JSF component library you like that provides AJAX capability to JSF, for example, RichFaces contains the ajax4jsf library. Also, the latest version of JSF, 2.0, includes some AJAX support out of the box.