deploy time configuration of EJB's

[placebojim]

Hi,

We are running into the problem of EJB's requiring environmental configuration such as ports remote hosts etc. The obvious solution seems to be to use the env-entry in ejb-jar.xml or to use a properties file inside the jar file but this means that to reconfigure the bean you must rebuild or at least manipulate the jar file. I don't want to go down this road really because I need to deploy the same bean in a lot of places with different config and it will become tiresome...

I would have thought that there would be a way for the container to provide configuration to the bean, specifically to over-ride the ejb-jar.xml or resolve names provided in there. It can be done for Datasources but this doesn't seem to be the case for name, value pair type resources like env-entry in ejb-jar.xml.

One solution is to use system properties provided on the command line eg -Dx.y.z=blah referenced in the Bean code but this doesn't seem very nice.

Any advice would be appreciated, thanks.

[genman]

A JMX MBean sounds perfect. You can bind them into JNDI if you like.

[henkomannen]

placebojim: have you come to any conclusion regarding your configuration issue? I'm as well looking for answers to this question. I'm having a hard time finding a solution. What are the best practices? Where are the complete examples?

Are there any good tutorials or trails for JMX MBeans? From what I've read they are the best choice for clustering and high availability of singleton classes, right? Are they suitable for reading application configuration properties? Should they implement the @Management interface? How are they to be correctly deployed? In the .ejb3 or .sar package? In an .ear?

Any help is appreciated!

/Henrik

[oglueck]

I couple of ideas are here:
http://www.odi.ch/weblog/posting.php?posting=69

[andiwauss]

Another (easy but not very flexible) way could be to use the system property service:
define e.g. different portnumbers within different jboss-instances and use the variable in the jboss-deployment descriptor ( -> ${portnumber} )