I have just recently been working on some more technical stuff - and I have to admit it is really nice to be back in the code.  Working with a couple of start-ups on the East coast lately I have been pottering around with some JBoss 4/5 and EJB3 configurations.   Since I’m going to be running around again soon - I thought I would blog a few bits and pieces on technology while I’m about it.

The first thing I noticed about pulling Maven and JBoss together was that the EJB packaging didn’t seem quite as intuitive as I thought.  In the end I did end up using the EJB plugin and the dependency plugin to get the dependencies in place.  This meant including both the plugins in an EJB parent POM.

<plugin>
	<artifactId>maven-ejb-plugin</artifactId>
	<configuration>
		<archive>
			<manifest>
				<addClasspath>true</addClasspath>
			</manifest>
		</archive>
		<ejbVersion>3.0</ejbVersion>
	</configuration>
</plugin>
<plugin>
	<groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
	<artifactId>maven-dependency-plugin
	</artifactId>
	<executions>
		<execution>
			<id>copy</id>
			<phase>compile</phase>
			<goals>
				<goal>copy-dependencies</goal>
			</goals>
			<configuration>
				<outputDirectory>target/classes</outputDirectory>
				<excludeScope>provided</excludeScope>
			</configuration>
		</execution>
	</executions>
</plugin>

With that code in place you just need to ensure you set the packaging to EJB on your EJB’s. I thought that copying the dependencies into the target was probably the nicest way, also you need to watch your dependencies and ensure that those you don’t want to use have a scope of provided so they they don’t get bundled. At first I thought that the dependency embedding should have been part of the EJB plugin, but actually given the power of the dependency plugin it actually made more sense to use that.