ejb-in-war: Deployment of a WAR Containing an EJB

Author: Paul Robinson

What is it?

This example demonstrates the deployment of an EJB 3.1 bean bundled in a war archive for deployment to JBoss AS 7.

The example follows the common "Hello World" pattern. These are the steps that occur:

1. A JSF page asks the user for their name.
2. On clicking submit, the name is sent to a managed bean (Greeter).
3. On setting the name, the Greeter invokes the GreeterEJB, which was injected to the managed bean (notice the field annotated with @EJB).
4. The response from invoking the GreeterEJB is stored in a field (message) of the managed bean.
5. The managed bean is annotated as @SessionScoped, so the same managed bean instance is used for the entire session. This ensures that the message is available when the page reloads and is displayed to the user.

System requirements

All you need to build this project is Java 6.0 (Java SDK 1.6) or better, Maven 3.0 or better.

The application this project produces is designed to be run on a JBoss AS 7 or JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 6. The following instructions target JBoss AS 7, but they also apply to JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 6.

With the prerequisites out of the way, you're ready to build and deploy.

Deploying the application

First you need to start JBoss AS 7 (or JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 6). To do this, run

$JBOSS_HOME/bin/standalone.sh

or if you are using windows

$JBOSS_HOME/bin/standalone.bat

To deploy the application, you first need to produce the archive to deploy using the following Maven goal:

mvn package

You can now deploy the artifact to JBoss AS by executing the following command:

mvn jboss-as:deploy

This will deploy target/jboss-as-ejb-in-war.war.

The application will be running at the following URL http://localhost:8080/jboss-as-ejb-in-war.

To undeploy from JBoss AS, run this command:

mvn jboss-as:undeploy

You can also start JBoss AS 7 and deploy the project using Eclipse. See the JBoss AS 7 Getting Started Developing Applications Guide for more information.

Importing the project into an IDE

If you created the project using the Maven archetype wizard in your IDE (Eclipse, NetBeans or IntelliJ IDEA), then there is nothing to do. You should already have an IDE project.

Detailed instructions for using Eclipse with JBoss AS 7 are provided in the JBoss AS 7 Getting Started Developing Applications Guide.

If you created the project from the commandline using archetype:generate, then you need to import the project into your IDE. If you are using NetBeans 6.8 or IntelliJ IDEA 9, then all you have to do is open the project as an existing project. Both of these IDEs recognize Maven projects natively.

Downloading the sources and Javadocs

If you want to be able to debug into the source code or look at the Javadocs of any library in the project, you can run either of the following two commands to pull them into your local repository. The IDE should then detect them.

mvn dependency:sources
mvn dependency:resolve -Dclassifier=javadoc