I discovered something interesting the other day at the office. We
have a guy who has been unable to build a certain entire jar of entity beans
ever since he started working there and I had only given it scant
thought as to why. I knew that I had had no problems... So he
came by my office on Wednesday and I said "OK. Let's figure this out."
I ran our Ant build file that is
specifically used for building this particular jar full of entity
beans and got the same errors he was reporting. Odd, thought I. The
errors being reported by ejbc were that the compiler couldn't resolve
symbols with names like Foo$ValueObject. That was odd since that
looked like the inner classes defined in each of the entity beans were
not there. But looking at the classes directory, those classes were
definitely there. What was really odd was that simply dropping back to J2SE
1.3.1, or even 1.4.1 worked.
For reference, we have a group of entity beans that each have a
nested class called ValueObject. (I don't particularly like that, but
they're there nonetheless.) Essentially we have 80 entity interfaces that follow
this basic pattern:
public interface Foo extends EJBLocalObject
{
...
public ValueObject getValueObject()
public static class ValueObject
{
...
}
}
and then 80 entity bean classes that actually implement the
getValueObject method.
It was at this point that I started looking at that "$" in the class name. It
then hit me that the code should be using a "." between the outer and
inner class names, not a "$". But the code where the error was
occurring was generated by ejbc. I've tried this now with WLS 7.0 sp2 and sp3 and the results are
identical.
Even though I've not been able to find this documented in the release
notes of J2SE, it would appear that versions prior to 1.4.2 allowed
code to specify an inner class using a dollar sign, even though it was
not technically correct, and that 1.4.2 has stopped being lenient in
this regard. Yes, I know that WLS 7 is not officially supported with
1.4.2... I haven't tried with WLS 8 yet; I would assume that since it
is supported with 1.4.2 they've changed the code
generation routines inside ejbc.
So the moral of the story is that if you find yourself needing to run
WLS 7 with J2SE 1.4.2, and you happen to have entity beans that you
need to run through ejbc, first run your build file for those entities
using J2SE <= 1.4.1, and run everything else under 1.4.2.
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