On Sep 22, 2007, at 7:04 AM, Karan Malhi wrote:
Awesome, so well formatted, very clean. I actually was talking to somebody who wanted to "try and move" the EJB development to openejb and deploy them later on some vendor app server in production. The blocker is JNDI names where they wanted more flexibility in JNDI names in that they have existing EJB's which already are given JNDI names which cannot be created with our JNDI names format. Maybe some day we could have a facility for defining our own JNDI names (without using the openejb.jndiname.format) to facilitate such cases (right now they will have to make changes in all the tests and the clients they have written for their EJB's -- too big a change for them because they have several web apps using their EJB's).
Couple thoughts. One, we definitely want to allow for OpenEJB users to specify the JNDI name on each bean or each interface of a bean. I've been thinking of how to do that and don't think it will be hard. It's just a matter of pulling it off in a way that doesn't create more complexity or an artificially confusing situation -- i.e. low cost flexibility.
The second thought is that I'm not sure being able to provide jndi names at an ejb or ejb interface level is exactly what they want despite the fact they asked for it. What I mean is that they shouldn't have to do any more then they are already doing. If they are specifying the JNDI names for all their beans in some vendor deployment descriptors they shouldn't have to do all that work again in our descriptors, we should just support at least that part of their vendor's descriptors. If they aren't supplying the names in descriptors and are relying upon some vendor default, we can implement the same default.
Another feedback was that they really liked the feature of openejb.jndiname.format . "Developers have to do one less step (of specifying the JNDI name) while creating the EJB and the JNDI name format can be standardized throughout all apps" -- was the feedback.
Great, this is the exact idea. And if someone wants a variable they don't want see, we can definitely add it.
They were also really excited to see that openejb could be embedded within tomcat. Already planning for tomcat + openejb + eclipse + ANT kind of an environment. Unfortunately, I could not show them a demo, cause I did not have an example ready on my laptop and also lack of time. Dain's docs came at the perfect time as I simply pointed to the link on our wiki and showed them the steps. Hopefully they will try it out soon. I need to work more on the eclipse openejb server plugin. Will be totally focussing on that whenever I get time. Great to see people accepting openejb with open arms and are willing to try the idea of using openejb for development and deploying to another app server in production. Maybe as they use it more for development, they get comfortable in using it in production too ;)
That definitely is great. -David
