Hi Wolf-Dieter Fink,

I've created a simple picture which will hopefully clarify the situation.

I'm not doing anything fancy: I simply have one WAR file located on "Server A" which trys to communicate with a Remote EJB on "Sever B" (the EJB is inside an EAR file).  That's it.  The EJB will talk to a database and retreive information.

I've made a little bit of progress on this topic.  I downloaded the "JBoss Quickstart" collection and used the "ejb-remote" example.  I put my  code into this project and pointed the jboss-ejb-client.properties file to point to "Server B" (as shown above), and it worked!  This tells me that: command-line java to remote JBoss server works, but JBoss Server to JBoss server doesn't work.  The question is: why?

If command-line java (running on Server A as shown above) can successfully connect to my remote EJB server (Server B as shown above), but the JBoss Server (also running on "Server A" as shown above) cannot, then this tells me something has to be configured on the client JBoss server.  The question is: what?

I know that the instruction guide found at: https://docs.jboss.org/author/display/AS71/EJB+invocations+from+a+remote+server+instance gave some configuration instructions, maybe I'll go re-examine those again...... I'll go do that now, meanwhile if any of you have any thoughts about this new piece of information please let me know.

Thanks.

JBoss AS 7 (version 7.1.1.Final) doesn't not seem to function properly as a client referencing a remote EJB on another JBoss AS 7 server.  We have followed the instructions given in the above links.  In-fact, we had a second engineer on our team attempt to following the same instructions and couldn't get it to work either.  We have banged-our-heads against the wall too long.  Finally, one engineer had a bright idea:  Let's take the same WAR file and deploy it on a Glassfish Server (version 3.1.2).  So in my drawing up above, imagine that Server A, is now a Glassfish Server instead of JBoss AS 7 server.  It worked!  No code changes required.  The exact same WAR file which didn't work on JBoss, now is working on Glassfish.

So the next idea was to deploy the same WAR file on a Tomcat 7 server.  It worked!

So let's examine the score:  A WAR file which uses JBoss JAR files and was setup according to instructions given by JBoss, does not work on JBoss.  But yet it will work on two of it's competitors: Glassfish & Tomcat. ?  !   .....

We are now in the process of getting permission from our corporate headquarters to use Tomcat as the front-end server.  We have no choice for the back-end server: we must use JBoss.  Our back-end servers are located behind a wirewall (in a different city). This is why we are using Remote EJBs. Corporate Headquarters wants us to use JBoss as the front-end server, but now we can go back to them and say:  "Hey look, we cannot get JBoss to function properly as a client to remote EJBs, but we can get it to work on Tomcat/Glassfish".

This is very disappointing (I'm looking at you JBoss).

By the way, in an effort to get this to work on JBoss, we stripped-down our project to a "Hello World" Remote EJB.  So in my drawing up-above, forget about "model.jar", forget about JPA Entites, forget about persistence.xml, forget about the structure of my EAR file, etc., etc.,  We stripped this down to as simple of a project as you can get, and JBoss still could not successfully call the Remote EJB.

And as long as I'm complaining, let me quickly rant about the instructions given here: https://docs.jboss.org/author/display/AS71/EJB+invocations+from+a+remote+server+instance

I appreciate the authors's time and energy, but as an engineer, this method is the most awkward I've seen to configure a remote ejb since the early 2000s back in the EJB 1.x days. It offers zero flexibility.

PS  JBoss has a "quickstart" quide online where you can download sample projects.  We downloaded it, and used the "ejb-remote".  In-fact we copyed the pom.xml to ensure that we were using the correct dependencies.  You can try this yourself: download the quickstart and run the "ejb-remote" project.  You will find that it is successful.  The reason it is successful, is because you are running the client from the command-line (not from a JBoss AS 7 server).  As soon as you "WAR-ify" this project (turn it into a WAR file by adding web.xml and something like JSF etc) and run it on a JBoss server, it fails.

Max, I'm glad to hear you are having the same problem as I.

I think we have overwhelmingly showed that the problem is JBoss running as the EJB Client.

We never solved the problem but luckily we got permission to use Tomcat 7 as the EJB Client server.

What I find the most humorous is how JBoss will not support the “mappedName” attribute.  This attribute is very useful. It allows you to quickly and easily configure and communicate with multiple Remote EJBs, and the Remote EJBs can reside on multiple servers. Glassfish does this very, very well. JBoss’s reason for not supporting the “mappedName” attribute is because it is “not officially part of the EE spec”. So my question to JBoss is: “Is the file jboss-ejb-client.properties part of the EE spec?”  JBoss will not support “mappedName” because it is not “standard”, but yet their own procedure for Remote EJBs is completely non-standard.