How do I make JNDI names compatible with both GlassFish and WildFly

Question

I am developing a Java EE 7 application and have a requirement for the application to be deployed onto application servers running either GlassFish 4.0 or WildFly 8.1.0. The issue I've got is GlassFish and WildFly use slightly different formats for JNDI names but I can't see how to make my application compatible with both.

In GlassFish my persistence.xml file references the data source jdbc/myDataSouce, but in WildFly the data source needs to be java:/jdbc/myDataSource.

The same is also true for classes that are annotated with @Resource. In GlassFish the annotation for a class using JavaMail would be @Resource(name = "mail/myMailSession"), but to deploy onto WildFly this would need to be @Resource(name = "java:mail/myMailSession").

I know that I could unpack the EAR and JAR files to manually edit files such as persistence.xml but I can't do that for classes that have been annotated with @Resource.

Is there a way I can allow my complied application to be deployed onto GlassFish and WildFly without maintaining two different versions of the code? I'm assuming the answer probably lies with application specific deployment descriptors but I can't find any examples that cover these two scenarios.

Can anyone point me in the right direction please?

Answer 1

You can modify the Wildfly JNDi names and strip the undesired prefixes from the respective JNDI names to find the least common denominator in both app servers. The following works for me with Glassfish and JBoss AS 7.1. Since I expect Wildfly to be backwards-compatible to JBoss in this regard, I guess it'll work for Wildfly as well.

Persistence

Inject as:

@PersistenceContext(unitName="TestPU")
private EntityManager entityManager;

or via ejb-jar.xml:

<persistence-context-ref>
    <persistence-context-ref-name>entityManager</persistence-context-ref-name>
    <persistence-unit-name>TestPU</persistence-unit-name>
    <injection-target> ... </injection-target>
</persistence-context-ref>

The corresponding persistence.xml:

<persistence version="2.0" xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/persistence" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="         http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/persistence         http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/persistence/persistence_2_0.xsd">
  <persistence-unit name="TestPU" transaction-type="JTA">
    <jta-data-source>datasources/TestDS</jta-data-source>
    <class>org.jeeventstore.persistence.jpa.EventStoreEntry</class>
    <properties>
      <property name="hibernate.show_sql" value="false"/>
      <property name="hibernate.format_sql" value="true"/>
      <property name="hibernate.hbm2ddl.auto" value="create-drop"/>
      <property name="hibernate.connection.charSet" value="UTF-8"/>
      <property name="eclipselink.logging.level" value="FINE"/>
      <property name="eclipselink.logging.level.sql" value="FINE"/>
      <property name="eclipselink.logging.parameters" value="true"/>
      <property name="eclipselink.ddl-generation" value="drop-and-create-tables"/>
    </properties>
  </persistence-unit>
</persistence>

(note the simple jta-data-source JNDI name)

Here's a glassfish-resources.xml file used to specify a Derby database on deployment, a similar setup can be used for MySQL or Postgres.

<resources>

    <jdbc-resource pool-name="ArquillianEmbeddedDerbyPool"
                   jndi-name="datasources/TestDS"/>

    <jdbc-connection-pool name="ArquillianEmbeddedDerbyPool"
                          res-type="javax.sql.DataSource"
                          datasource-classname="org.apache.derby.jdbc.EmbeddedDataSource"
                          is-isolation-level-guaranteed="false">
        <property name="databaseName" value="target/databases/derby"/>
        <property name="createDatabase" value="create"/>
    </jdbc-connection-pool>

</resources>

And the settings from the JBoss standalone.xml:

<datasource jta="true" jndi-name="java:/datasources/TestDS" pool-name="TestDS" enabled="true" use-ccm="false">
    <connection-url>jdbc:postgresql://localhost/test_db</connection-url>
    ...
</datasource>

Resources

I have not injected a JavaMail component on Glassfish, but similar to the datasoruce settings, it might be worth a try to strip the "java:" part from the @Resource annotation as well.

@Resource(name = "mail/myMailSession")

and then configure Wildfly such that that the mail resource is available at the "java:mail/myMailSession" JNDI location.

Injection via ejb-jar.xml

Another option is to manually inject the fields via a ejb-jar.xml file, and then use a build tool such as maven to copy either of ejb-jar-glassfish.xml or ejb-jar-wildfly.xml to the desired ejb-jar.xml at assembly time.

In one of our projects we use a mixed approach to avoid the burden with the xml configuration: We configure a small number of "provider" beans via ejb-jar.xml to inject, e.g., the persistence context into a PersistenceContextProvider, and then use CDI to inject the PersistenceContextProvider into the EJBs via @EJB, which are found without further configuration since they reside in the same EAR.