To include a single jar by name, just declare a 'Deployments' element with a 'jar' attribute pointing to the jar file on the file system.

The last element in the example uses a relative path to point to the ejb jar. This path will be resolved relative to the catalina.base property. So, for example, of the value of catalina.base was 'c:' then TomEE would look for the jar 'c:.jar'. See the [OPENEJB:Configuration] guide for more details.

To point to a directory that contains several jar files that TomEE should load, simply declare a 'Deployments' element with a 'dir' attribute pointing to the directory containing the jar files.

The directories listed will be searched for jars containing 'META-INF/ejb-jar.xml' files and will be added to the list of jars to load if they do. Better said, it’s completely safe to point to a directory containing a mix of ejbs and regular jar files. TomEE will simply skip over jars that do contain the required 'META-INF/ejb-jar.xml' file.

The last Deployments element declares a 'beans' directory relative to catalina.base for holding ejb jars. This declaration is simply convention and not required.

As of 1.0 beta1, TomEE supports unpacked ejb jars. Simply meaning that you don’t need to pack your ejb’s into a jar file in order to use them in TomEE. You still need to follow the ejb jar layout and include an "META-INF/ejb-jar.xml" in the directory that contains your ejbs.

For example, if you have a directory structure like this:

Then you would delcare a 'Deployments' element with the 'dir' attribute set to 'C:' as shown below.

Note that this syntax is the same as the directory syntax above. If TomEE finds a META-INF directory with an 'ejb-jar.xml' fine inside, then TomEE will treat the directory as an unpacked ejb jar. Otherwise TomEE will look for ejb jar files to load as detailed in the above section.

When trying to figure out if your ejbs were loaded, the openejb.log file is an incredible asset.

If your ejbs were loaded successfully you should see entries like the following (1.x and higher only):

If your ejbs failed to load, you will see an entry similar to the following.

Additionally, all the successfully loaded ejbs are individually listed in the log file at startup. The Deployment ID listed is the JNDI name used to lookup the ejb from a client of the Local or Remote Servers. The beans listed below are from our test suite.