Creating Deployment Descriptors for Message-Driven Beans

By using resource injection and annotations, you avoid having to create a standard ejb-jar.xml deployment descriptor file for a message-driven bean. However, in certain situations you still need a deployment descriptor specific to the Application Server, in the file sun-ejb-jar.xml.

You are likely to need a deployment descriptor if the message-driven bean will consume messages from a remote system. You use the deployment descriptor to specify the connection factory that points to the remote system. The deployment descriptor would look something like this:

<sun-ejb-jar>
  <enterprise-beans>
    <ejb>
      <ejb-name>MessageBean</ejb-name>
      <mdb-connection-factory>
        <jndi-name>jms/JupiterConnectionFactory</jndi-name>
      </mdb-connection-factory>
    </ejb>
  </enterprise-beans>
</sun-ejb-jar>

The ejb element for the message-driven bean contains the following:

• The ejb-name element contains the package name of the bean class.

• The mdb-connection-factory element contains a jndi-name element that specifies the connection factory for the bean.

For an example of the use of such a deployment descriptor, see An Application Example That Consumes Messages from a Remote Server.