Looking up an EJB from a Web Service under JBoss 4.x

EJB injection in Web Services does not work with JBoss (yet), so when you want to use an EJB from your @WebService annotated POJO you have no choice but to look it up yourself.

This can get a little tricky, because each J2EE container can use its own JNDI naming convention when registering the EJB in the global naming context. Here I document how I configured JBoss to register my EJB with a name that I choose, and how I mapped a proper EJB name to that JNDI name.

Naming the EJB

Give your EJB a reasonably unique name in its annotation:

@Stateless(name=”MyServiceBean”)
@Local(SomeInterface.class)
public class ServiceBean implements SomeInterface {
…
}

Tell JBoss what JNDI name to register it under

Include the following in your jboss.xml file:

MyServiceBean
myapp/MyJNDIName

Tell JBoss to map an EJB name to the JNDI name

In your WAR, configure your jboss-web.xml file to include this:

ejb/MyEJBName
myapp/MyJNDIName

Lookup the EJB from your Web Service

You can now lookup the EJB directly from your Web Service:

@WebService
public class MyWebService {
private SomeInterface getMyBean() {
try {
return (SomeInterface) new InitialContext().lookup(“java:comp/env/ejb/MyEJBName”);
} catch (NamingException e) {
throw new EJBException(e);
}
}
}