A JavaEE application with a multi-tier application generally has a presentation layer running in a servlet engine, a business logic layer running in a EJB container and a persistence layer facilitating JPA. During the development often there are occasions where a new functionality in the business logic (called backend from now on), which has no corresponding code in the presentation layer (let’s name it frontend), yet. So, what you need is a way to try out your code. This post shows you how to use the groovy shell to connect via JNDI to your remote session beans and call them in order to test your application fast. You may use it for a fast monitoring or maintenance API to your system, too. The groovy code of your efforts to test your code (monitor your application) may even be read from the history of the groovy shell and compiled into byte code. This code may be called from a test case or in a monitoring software (like nagios).
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