JEE Status Meetings/2008-07-24

Attendees

• Kaloyan Raev
• Chuck Bridgham
• Carl Anderson
• Konstantin Komissarchik

Agenda

1. Requiring DDs

EJB currently requires a DD for EJB clients - is that necessary?

Web does not create a DD for Servlets, Listeners and Filters - is that correct?

2. WTP 3.1 planning

Java EE 6 theme?

EJB Tools plan (enhancements bug with "plan" keyword)

Minutes

EJB currently requires a DD for EJB clients - is that necessary?

The EJB spec seems to require that the EJB client JAR is declared in the <ejb-client-jar> tag in ejb-jar.xml.

Most developers would like to avoid the generation of ejb-jar.xml.

There is no need for the <ejb-client-jar> tag at runtime because classloading is covered by the manifest class-path. The only need for this tag we see in tooling. However, this need can be overcome in WTP easily.

Action Item: We should inquire about an official interpretation from the JCP group that worked on the EJB specificaton.

Web does not create a DD for Servlets, Listeners and Filters - is that correct?

Java EE 5 spec requires that Servlets, Filters and Listeners are described in the web.xml.

Currently the corresponding wizards does not generate the web.xml if it does not yet exist. But they should do. The question is how to interact with the user about such generation of web.xml.

The most appropriate approach is to warn the user in the wizard (via a warning message in the wizard's title area) that web.xml will be generated. It is better than a warning dialog to popup upon clicking on the Finish button.

WTP 3.1 planning

It's a very big and important topic. It would be better if we discuss this when there are more attendees. It would be even better if we take a certain topic from the planning and schedule it for a concrete meeting. Then the interesting parties can join the meeting to discuss this exact topic.

What we have at the moment for EJB Tools plan is good. We should go further and proceed with proposing items for JEE Tools.

Java EE 6

We should still be focused on improving our tooling support for Java EE 5.

We could provide some basic Java EE 6 support like we did for Java EE 5 in Europa.

The most challenging feature for EJB 3.1 support would be .war packaging of EJB components feature.

Other

Konstantin raised attention to bug 116469.

Mixing spec levels in EAR: we put this in the WTP 3.1 plan and will discuss it later.