Seam, MDB, EJB and glassfish coming together

The situation seems to be quite complex but I think it can happen to anyone :) So I have a Glassfish 2.1 appserver with Seam 2.2GA. I use several Seam components in the web tier and they interact with stateless EJBs as well, because some functionality has to be accessible through a remote EJB interface.

Injecting EJBs to Seam components are quite simple, just use the @In annotation. Seam will notice that it's a session bean, and use the default jndi name to look it up, as configured in the components.xml:

    <core:init jndi-pattern="java:comp/env/YOUR-APP-NAME/#{ejbName}/local"/>

You can also inject Seam components to session beans, using the same @In annotation. Everything works fine, however, you have to define your local EJB references in the web.xml (on Glassfish), so that Seam can look them up from the web tier as well. Otherwise, local interfaces are not accessible from the web tier. The case is similar for Message Driven Beans (MDBs). Local interface references have to be declared.

If you just use @In annotations in your MDB (or any seam component invoked from the MDB), you'll get NameNotFoundExceptions for "java:comp/env/YOUR-APP-NAME/YOUR-EJB-NAME/local".

You have to declare your ejb reference in your MDB, and the easiest way to do it is to use @EJB annotations in your MDB class. This would be fine, but by default, the JNDI name will be "java:comp/env/your.message.driven.bean.full.ClassName/referenceVariableName", so you have to override it by using the @EJB(name="YOUR-APP-NAME/YOUR-EJB-NAME/local" annotation. By declaring this, Glassfish will make your local EJB interfaces accessible for the code running from the MDB.