I'm fairly new to EJBs and full blown application servers like JBoss, having written and worked with special purpose standalone Java applications for most of my career, with limited use of JEE. I'm wondering about the best way to adapt a commonly used design pattern to EJB3 and JBoss: the static factory pattern. In fact this is Item #1 in Joshua Bloch's Effective Java book (2nd edition)

I'm currently working with the following factory:

public class CredentialsProcessorFactory {
    private static final Log log = LogFactory.getLog(CredentialsProcessorFactory.class);
    private static Map<CredentialsType, CredentialsProcessor> PROCESSORS = 
        new HashMap<CredentialsType, CredentialsProcessor>();

    static {
        PROCESSORS.put(CredentialsType.CSV, new CSVCredentialsProcessor());
    }

    private CredentialsProcessorFactory() {}

    public static CredentialsProcessor getProcessor(CredentialsType type) {
       CredentialsProcessor p = PROCESSORS.get(type);
       if(p == null)
           throw new IllegalArgumentException("No CredentialsProcessor registered for type " + type.toString());
       return p;
}

However, in the implementation classes of CredentialsProcessor, I require injected resources such as a PersistenceContext, so I have made the CredentialsProcessor interface a @Local interface, and each of the impl's marked with @Stateless. Now I can look them up in JNDI and use the injected resources.

But now I have a disconnect because I am not using the factory anymore. My first thought was to change the getProcessor(CredentialsType) method to do a JNDI lookup and return the SLSB instance that is required, but then I need to configure and pass the proper qualified JNDI name. Before I go down that path, I wanted to do more research on accepted practices.

How is this design pattern treated in EJB3 / JEE?