- regarding jars in the lib of the server, they should never be treated as BDAs, right? (I know we discussed about this, but I'm so deep in so many details that now I got confused :-) )
No, I think they should -- but, only if they have beans.xml in their metadata location.
- the Deployment.loadBeanDeploymentArchive(Class<?> beanClass) method should search only for the archives included in the deployment, or for all archives visible from the deployment? A small example to ilustrate my question: if there are two separate ejb-jars deployed, A and B, and I invoke loadBeanDeploymentArchive at the deployment that represents ejb-jar A, using a class that is in ejb-jar B as parameter, should the deployment be able to find it?
I think yes, you should be able to "jump" from deployement to deployment if they can "see" each other.
It would be your (hidden) impl that would easily allow this; e.g. keeping proper overall structure with easy-to-access mapping.
- this one is still about loadBeanDeploymentArchive method, and I think Ales knows the answer. Since the parameter of this method is a class, I don't need to look for an archive that contains a class with the same name. I could use instead the ClassLoader to determine the module and, hence, to find the corresponding archive. Should I do it this way?
Yes, more or less.
It depends on the impl details how you're gonna map the overall structure.