3.0.x -> 3.2.x EJB upgrade

[davekohr]

I noticed that for JBoss-specific EJB deployment, there is a new jboss_3_2.dtd for the jboss.xml files. There appear to be a lot of changes in this DTD from 3.0 to 3.2.

To run on JBoss 3.2.x, is it required for all EJB's to use the new 3.2 DTD? Or is there backward compatibility if an EJB uses the 3.0 DTD? When you convert from the 3.0 to 3.2 DTD, are there any tricky conversion issues?

Thanks,

[adrian.brock]

You should not be affected unless you defined your own container configurations.
You may want to take advantage of some of the new features though.

Regards,
Adrian

[davekohr]

Thanks for the tip, Adrian. It turns out the problem was with our jboss.xml CMP descriptor. We had mistakenly defined a CMP entity bean with no fields. JBoss 3.0.7 had no problem with that, but deployment in 3.2.3 failed with a null pointer exception. Seems like the kind of thing that should either be accepted gracefully or cause a warning.

I also did some informal testing to see what kinds of problems the deployer can catch, specifically some field/column mismatches between the ejb-jar.xml and jboss.xml descriptors. I recall there are several kinds of mismatches it doesn't catch. It would be a big help to debugging CMP beans if the deployer extensively error-checked all the deployment descriptors.

[adrian.brock]

If you have examples, post them as bugs at
www.sf.net/projects/jboss

You can catch some errors by turning on dtd validation for the EJBDeployer
in conf/jboss-service.xml

Also NPE isn't an acceptable error message, post that as a bug as well
(with stacktrace). It should give a "reasonable" error message.

Regards,
Adrian