Eager / auto loading of EJB / load EJB on startup (on JBoss)

As of EJB 3.1, singleton beans can be notified of module start and stop:

@Singleton
@Startup
public class StartupBean {
    @PostConstruct
    private void postConstruct() { /* ... */ }

    @PreDestroy
    private void preDestroy() { /* ... */ }
}

Prior to EJB 3.1, there is no standard, EJB-only solution. I'd suggest adding a WAR to your EAR and using a servlet-context-listener.

According to Adam Bien's Real World Java EE Patterns - Rethinking Best Practices (see a summary of the patterns) and the Service Starter pattern, it is indeed as bkail suggests

• with Java EE 6 = EJB 3.1 use @Singleton with @Startup (and perhaps also with @DependsOn)
• prior to that the only standard and portable way is to use the Servlet API, e.g. a HttpServlet starting the EJBs in its init() method and load-on-startup set to 1 in web.xml.