Tools for Working with EJBs in WebLogic Server 8.1

In WebLogic Server 8.1, BEA provides several tools to help create, deploy, and manage EJBs:

• EJBGen— A tool that generates EJB 2.0 code. It takes in EJB class files with JavaDoc comments and then generates the Home and Remote interfaces along with the deployment descriptors. BEA recommends using EJBGen to generate the deployment descriptors because it's a hard task to create them manually.

• DDInit— A command-line tool that looks at a directory containing EJBs and builds the standard J2EE and the WebLogic-specific deployment descriptors.

• Ant tasks to create skeleton deployment descriptors— You can use the Ant tasks shipped with WebLogic to create skeleton deployment descriptors. These will be incomplete because Ant cannot create the desired mappings and configurations.

• WebLogic Builder— A visual tool that enables you to work with the deployment descriptors for your entire enterprise application. It helps you not only with the EJB-specific descriptors, but also enables the management of the entire application deployment process.

• weblogic.Deployer— A command line tool that can deploy your EJBs. This can be run from the command line, a shell script, or included in your Ant scripts.

• Appc— The new EJB compiler that compiles and deploys the EJB to WebLogic Server.

• DDConverter— A command-line tool to upgrade your EJB deployment descriptors from a previous version to the latest version.

In this release of WebLogic, BEA has deprecated several features that have been central to the previous releases of WebLogic. We examine those features in the next section.