I had almost forgotten this type of software development after I started using lightweight J2EE technologies, like
Spring, and Hibernate. Recently, however, I had to involve with a project, some part of it depends on EJBs! What
is worse is that they were EJB 2.1. After trying mock approach with mockejb and playing with open-ejb and geronimo
for local deployment sometime without any reasonable outcome, we decided to directly deploy the application into our target
environment because of the tight schedule constraints of project.
Well, actually deployment of EJB’s happened without any problem. We were still lucky until that step, but when it came
to test our application, development process somehow turned out to a “deploy, test, debug, and code” cycle, what I call
it as “deployment driven development”. Other than this cycle, you have hardly any choice to see if there is any hole in
business logic, invalid SQL expression, or any other bug in the system. If, for example, there is a little invalid SQL
expression within your BMP entity bean, or forgot to provide some value to a compulsory field, you have to first package
your EJBs, create an EAR and perform several container specific steps to deploy them.
I know, some of those problems could have been easily resolved with a level of abstraction among EJB specific classes
and code in which actual job performed, but this couldn’t be always possible, especially if you’re partly involving with
the system. Moreover, apart from those, it is always possible that development process could easily turn into
“deployment driven” mode while working with EJBs. In summary, working with EJBs is a real mess!