I was recently tasked to upgrade an Enterprise Java Bean (EJB) application from WebLogic 8.1 to WebLogic 11g. Well, on the surface, this seemed like a pretty straight conversion. Upgrade the Java JDK from Java SDK 1.4 to Java SDK 1.6, maybe make a few tweaks to the Ant build file and voila, finished. Well, thinks in life are never as simple as people portray them to be. My issue arose from the fact that our Ant build.xml file uses a custom WebLogic Ant task – EJBC.

Here is the link to the documentation:
EJBC – WebLogic Ant Task

According to the documentation: “This tool will take a serialized deployment descriptor, examine the various EJB interfaces and bean classes and then generate the required support classes necessary to deploy the bean in a Weblogic EJB container. This will include the RMI stubs and skeletons as well as the classes which implement the bean’s home and remote interfaces.”

Basically it adds WebLogic specific generated classes into your EJB jar or ear file.

This is all well and good, however, this Ant task has been deprecated in WebLogic 11g. Instead they instruct you to use the new and improved APPC WebLogic Ant task. Here is the link to the new task documentation:
APPC – WebLogic Ant Task

To Be Continued …

Have to convert ejbs to use annotations with EJBGen from WebLogic