I don't think that's deprecated. Personally I didn't use that approach because I had lots of difficulties using EJBClientContext.setSelector(this.selector) because I was trying to invoke EJB's in one container instance from inside another instance. Firstly the setSelector has permissions locked from the security manager and secondly the JTS couldn't commit the transaction. The transaction manager commit runs in another thread with another classloader and I had no control over the client context it tries to use.