Storing Singleton Bean in JNDI with GlassFish 5

Question

I have a working Glassfish 5 setup inside of Eclipse.

I have modules set up like this:

common

• contains remote interface for singleton bean with @remote and @local annotation
• included in all other modules as a pom dependency

core

• contains a singleton bean that implements the interface in common
• intended to contain service classes stored in JNDI that allow any number of clients to lookup and store data and/or access other service logic
• builds a war file that deploys onto GlassFish

desktop

• does an InitialContext lookup of the singleton bean. (I intend to abstract this into the Service Lookup design pattern).
• intended to be a desktop client that remotely accesses beans stored on the server.
• Right now, I'm just trying to get it to remotely access the service in core and print some text to the console proving it worked.

I think my problem stems from a misunderstanding of how to store a custom bean in JNDI in the first place. I looked on Google, but I mostly find articles and answers to questions telling me to add name and mappedName to the Singleton annotation or they only show how to add a predefined bean into JDNI such as a Boolean or String, and not something custom defined.

My bean is defined like this:

@Singleton(name = "BookService", mappedName = "ejb/BookService")
public class BookServiceImpl implements BookService {

    private static final long serialVersionUID = 1L;

which results in this on the Glassfish server: Core Server Screenshot

but nothing appears in JNDI: JNDI Screenshot

The client does it's InitialContext lookup like this (I've tried multiple ways of writing the JNDI name):

BookService bookService = (BookService) initialContext.lookup("java:global/core/BookService");

using these configurations (I defined my domain with a base port of 8000, so every port is 8000 + something):

glashfishEnvironmentTable = new Hashtable<String, String>();
glashfishEnvironmentTable.put(Context.INITIAL_CONTEXT_FACTORY,
            "com.sun.enterprise.naming.impl.SerialInitContextFactory");
glashfishEnvironmentTable.put(Context.STATE_FACTORIES,
            "com.sun.corba.ee.impl.presentation.rmi.JNDIStateFactoryImpl");
glashfishEnvironmentTable.put(Context.URL_PKG_PREFIXES, "com.sun.enterprise.naming");
//glashfishEnvironmentTable.put(Context.PROVIDER_URL, "ejbd://localhost:8080/");
// on a different host than the appserver   
glashfishEnvironmentTable.put("org.omg.CORBA.ORBInitialHost", "localhost");
// optional.  Defaults to 3700.  Only needed if target orb port is not 3700.
glashfishEnvironmentTable.put("org.omg.CORBA.ORBInitialPort", "8037");

I get an error like this when I run it:

Exception in thread "main" javax.naming.CommunicationException: Communication exception for SerialContext[myEnv={org.omg.CORBA.ORBInitialPort=8037, java.naming.factory.initial=com.sun.enterprise.naming.impl.SerialInitContextFactory, org.omg.CORBA.ORBInitialHost=localhost, java.naming.factory.url.pkgs=com.sun.enterprise.naming, java.naming.factory.state=com.sun.corba.ee.impl.presentation.rmi.JNDIStateFactoryImpl} [Root exception is java.rmi.MarshalException: CORBA MARSHAL 1330446343 No; nested exception is: 
org.omg.CORBA.MARSHAL: FINE: 00810007: Underflow in BufferManagerReadStream after last fragment in message  vmcid: OMG  minor code: 7  completed: No]

I think my InitialContext is configured properly because when I manually define the bean in JNDI like this (The ServiceFactory doesn't do anything, because I don't know how to properly extend ObjectFactory):

Bean defined in JNDI

I get this:

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.ClassCastException: javax.naming.Reference cannot be cast to common.service.BookService

Is there simple fix to this I am missing, or am I mixing oil and water trying to get an EJB Singleton into JNDI? Or am I missing something big like an EJBHome or a Servlet?

Do I need to extend the factory class to add my service classes into JDNI, or should ObjectFactory work? If I must extend the factory class, how would I go about it?

I hope I've defined the scope of the question well enough, but this is all new to me, so if anybody has experience implementing something like this, I appreciate any input that gets me closer to doing it right.

Answer 1

I figured it out. I did two things I shouldn't have.

1. I forgot to maven install my common module before building my war file... doh!
2. It seems that the @Remote and the @Local annotations cannot be in the same interface or it will fail (which is a shame, because I was trying to set it up so I didn't have to have two nearly identical interfaces).

Here are some more details in case someone else has a similar issue and needs to see something that works (I haven't done @Local here, because I haven't tried it yet. It should be trivial to add though):

1. For remote execution, you need an interface annotated with @Remote that extends Serializable (Serialization is required for Client/Server interface).

import java.io.Serializable;

public interface Remote extends Serializable{

}

import javax.ejb.Remote;

@Remote
public interface BookServiceRemote extends Remote {

    public String readBook();

}

2. Your war file needs to contain the BookServiceImpl

import javax.ejb.Singleton;

import us.boggs.template.common.service.BookServiceRemote;

@Singleton(name = "BookService")
public class BookServiceImpl implements BookServiceRemote {

    private static final long serialVersionUID = 1L;

    @Override
    public String readBook() {
        return "Read the book.";
    }
}

3. Your client pom.xml must include the common module and this:

<dependency>
 <groupId>org.glassfish.main.appclient</groupId>
 <artifactId>gf-client</artifactId>
 <version>5.1.0</version>
</dependency>

4. Your client main method can use this by creating an InitialContext and doing a lookup(My base port was 8000, so my ORBInitialPort is 8000+37=8037):

private static Hashtable<String, String> glashfishEnvironmentTable;

static {
    glashfishEnvironmentTable = new Hashtable<String, String>();
    glashfishEnvironmentTable.put(Context.INITIAL_CONTEXT_FACTORY,
                "com.sun.enterprise.naming.impl.SerialInitContextFactory");
    glashfishEnvironmentTable.put(Context.STATE_FACTORIES,
                "com.sun.corba.ee.impl.presentation.rmi.JNDIStateFactoryImpl");
    glashfishEnvironmentTable.put(Context.URL_PKG_PREFIXES, "com.sun.enterprise.naming"); 
    glashfishEnvironmentTable.put("org.omg.CORBA.ORBInitialHost", "localhost");
    // optional.  Defaults to 3700.  Only needed if target orb port is not 3700.
    glashfishEnvironmentTable.put("org.omg.CORBA.ORBInitialPort", "8037");
}

InitialContext initialContext = new InitialContext(glashfishEnvironmentTable);
        BookServiceRemote bookService = (BookServiceRemote) initialContext.lookup("java:global/core/BookService");
System.out.println(bookService.readBook());