I'm just implementing a JavaEE assignment I was given on an interview.

I have some prior experience with EJB, but nothing related to JMS and MDBs. So here's what I find through the numerous examples:

• application servers bind their topics and queues to different JNDI names - for example topic/queue, jms
• the activationConfig property is required on JBoss, while in the Sun tutorial it is not.
• after starting my application, jboss warns me that my topic isn't bound (it isn't actually - I haven't bound it, but I expect it to be bound automatically - in fact, in an example for JBoss 4.0 automatic binding does seem to happen). A suggested solution is to map it in some jboss files or even use jboss-specific annotations.

This might be just JBoss, but since it is certified to implement to spec, it appears the spec doesn't specify these these things. And there all the alleged portability vanishes.

So I wonder - how come it is claimed that JavaEE is portable and you can take an ear and deploy it on another application server and it magically runs, if such extremely basic things don't appear to be portable at all.

P.S. sorry for the rant, but I'm assume I might be doing/getting something wrong, so state your opinions.