I am not sure what your original problem was - maybe I missed exactly what NetBeans problem you were running into.
I have attached a zip file containing an example that works for me with NetBeans 6.8 and a very current build of GlassFish 3.1. The example simply gets a Date object for the current date and time from the server's stateless session bean and then the client displays the string equivalent.
The zip contains three projects:
SimpleTest - an EAR with an EJB submodule and an app client submodule (although the app client is not really needed for your use case)
SimpleTestCommon - a library JAR containing the EJB's remote interface
SimpleTestSA - a Java SE project containing the Java SE client
I added SimpleTestCommon as a library to the SimpleTest EJB submodule and to the SimpleTestSA Java SE client project. I also added the gf-client.jar from my GlassFish installation as a library to SimpleTestSA.
NetBeans copied the two library JARs into the SimpleTestSA/dist/lib folder - and added Class-Path references to them to the SimpleTestSA manifest.
[b]Note that we cannot rely on that copy of gf-client.jar, because of its own relative references to other GlassFish JARs which NetBeans does not copy into the dist/lib folder.[/b]
I was able to run the Java SE client from inside NetBeans normally. I could also run it successfully from outside NetBeans by using
java -classpath (path-to-my-gf-client.jar):(path-to-SimpleTestSA/dist/SimpleTestSA.jar) simpletestsa.Main
It is only by adding my installation's gf-client.jar to the runtime classpath that I made all those JARs referenced from gf-client's manifest available.
Lastly, note that I used the Java EE 6 portable JNDI name to look up the resource, as suggested by the EJB FAQ which Ken pointed to earlier.
Hope this helps.
- Tim
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