Cross-server development and packaging of EJBs - I am puzzled

[Alex Molochnikov]

I would like to get an opinion from other EJB developers who might have
faced a similar problem.

I am developing an EJB for deployment on various app servers (JBoss, Sun
ONE, BEA WebLogic). Ideally, I would like to keep a single codebase, and
only tweak the XML deployment descriptors when necessary. This seems to be
an achievable goal for targeting JBoss and Sun ONE, but not WebLogic.

I do all development in Eclipse, using JBoss plugin and XDoclet to generate
the interface and XML files. XDoclet provides options for generating the
files for many app servers, including WebLogic, but it only creates the
following files for my test HelloBean class:

Hello.java
HelloHome.java
ejb-jar.xml
weblogic-cmp-rdbms-jar.xml
weblogic-ejb-jar.xml

and this file structure is very similar to the other target app servers for
which XDoclet generates files.

However, if I use WebLogic's Workshop for the same bean class, it creates
many more files, e.g.

Hello_oztp1s_EOImpl.class
Hello_oztp1s_EOImpl_814_WLStub.class
Hello_oztp1s_EOImplRTD.xml
Hello_oztp1s_Impl.class

and other files, all packaged into an EAR file.

Assuming that all these classes and XML files are needed for proper
deployment and operation of the bean, does this mean that the only way to
build the EAR file for WebLogic is to use their proprietary tools, like
Workshop? What's more, if the code must be handled by Workshop, the tags
inside the Java code, used to generate these auxiliary files, are not
XDoclet tags, but use syntax specific to WebLogic (e.g.
@ejbgen:remote-method instead of XDoclet's @ejb.interface-method).

If my observations are correct (I hope not), the above means that WebLogic
expects me to maintain a separate codebase for it, different from the
codebase shared by JBoss and Sun ONE.

Can anyone comment on this? Am I perhaps missing something, like a special
Eclipse plugin for WebLogic (but not the one available from BEA's site -
that one can only start and stop the server from Eclipse, and is pretty
useless for anything else).

I will appreciate any help in this matter.

Alex Molochnikov