Should Bean classes be developed as 'abstract'

[qmqasim]

The examples in 'Enterprise JavaBeans' book by Richard Monson-Haefel implements entity beans as abstract classes.

So I did one example where I declared my entity bean as abstract. So the code looked something like:

public abstract class CabinBean
implements javax.ejb.EntityBean
{


public abstract void setName(String name);
public abstract String getName();
......

However, when I deployed it into JBoss I got a error message saying that entity beans cannot be declared as abstract.

So I am a bit confused. Do they need to be declared as abstract or not.

regards

[tthiele]

I don't know the actual issue of the Monson-Haefel book. AFAIK an EJB can't be abstract. Either you must derive your CabinBean class to a
non abstract class e.g. CabinCMP manually or let it to a tool like xdoclet. Please refer to the Getting Started Documentation for JBoss and the XDoclet (sourceforge) Documentation for this topic.

Regards
Tilo

[andyjeff]

My understanding is that with EJB2.0 (JBoss 3.0) you have to declare classes as abstract, and declare the set/get methods as abstract. In EJB1.1 this was NOT the case. This was a change in the EJB2.0 introduction. The OReilly book (issue 3) refers (almost completely) to EJB2.0, hence what you have read. This applies to CMP entity beans anyway.

HTH

[neitzel1]

AN EJB cannot be abstract? I think, that this is wrong. When I look at my Beans I will always find:

public abstract class MyBean implements EntityBean {
...
public abstract MyType getMyField();
public abstract void setMyField(MyType value);
...
}

And I think that this is the normal way, to write a EB.

This is also described in the JBoss Workbook. Just have a look at http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/entjbeans3/workbooks/

Konrad