I'm having trouble obtaining a reference to an EJB entity bean in a portlet.

The entity bean has successfully deployed and I've confirmed the JNDI name in the jmx-console (PersonBean).

I had first tried to obtain the reference through the EJB annotation, injecting it into the portlet as such:

public class ModifyPerson extends GenericPortlet {
@EJB(name="PersonBean")
private PersonLocal bean;
.
.
.
}

(PersonLocal is the local interface)

However, this did not appear to work as I got a NullPointerException when I tried to call any of its methods.

When that faied, I tried to do a JNDI lookup in the init() method:

public void inti() throws PortletException{
 try{
 InitialContext ctx = new InitialContext();
 bean = (PersonLocal) ctx.lookup("java:/env/comp/PersonBean");
 }catch(NamingException ex){
 throw new PortletException(ex.getMessage());
 }
}

The portlet instance did not appear to have thrown any exceptions when initializing, which I had thought was promising, but when I try to call any of the bean's methods, I still get the NullPointerException.

I am assuming this NullPointerException is the result of bean remaining as a null value as an actual reference to the bean is not obtained.

Any help in this matter will be greatly appreciated.