@gavinking this is my summary

First I must say that overall I really like what Ceylon brings to a JEE application. There are areas of discomfort, but I must say that it is super pleasant to see the LOC-melt from Java to Ceylon.
And also, the JPA entities looks very good in Ceylon.

That being said, the problems now :

Ceylon WarInitializer and JPA

Ceylon WarInitializer leverages a servlet initialization to initialize Ceylon in a war. Problem is, the servlet initialization does not kick in so enough during the container startup in order to handle all cases.

For instance here a singleton EJB is used to bootstrap the model of the application in database https://github.com/sgalles/ceylon-dddsample/blob/master/source/dddsample/cargotracker/application/util/SampleDataGenerator.ceylon but this happens before the servlet init.

A workaround was added in ceylon-dddsample for this problem :

The WarInitializer servlet is deactivated, and is replaced by almost the same initialization in a portable CDI Extension https://github.com/sgalles/ceylon-dddsample/blob/master/source/dddsample/CeylonInit.java

Problem is, this scheme is not generic enough to be proposed as an alternative to the WarInitializer servlet, indeed :

• it has a dependency on org.jboss.vfs.VirtualFile because that's the only way that I found to emulate the behavior of WarInitializer without a ServletContext available
• Even with the help of org.jboss.vfs.VirtualFile I had to find a workaround for https://issues.jboss.org/browse/JBVFS-147 and I leverage a side effect of the implementation of org.jboss.vfs.VirtualFile. It probably means that CeylonInit is not even Wildfly-portable...

FTR Here https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/ceylon-users/Lbcnm3ac9PA/hJgZxcqZAwAJ @jvasileff provides a general solution to this initialization problem.

Ceylon collections not usable in JPA entities

Is suspect that not much can be done about this, but basically all collections in JPA entities must be plain Java collections, else JPA complains (IIRC it did not work when I tried to use the collection wrappers of the SDK, but I may have to check this out again).
Update : as suggested by @gavinking, Hibernate Tuplizers should help.

javax.persistence.Converter does not work in autoApply mode

It is minor, but I had to manually apply the converter declared here https://github.com/sgalles/ceylon-dddsample/blob/master/source/dddsample/cargotracker/domain/infrastructure/persistence/jpa/CeylonEnumValuesConverter.ceylon because when I tried to set autoApply=true I received strange classloader errors IIRC. Well not a big deal though, the manual mode works like a charm https://github.com/sgalles/ceylon-dddsample/blob/master/source/dddsample/cargotracker/domain/model/cargo/Delivery.ceylon#L50

FTR fixed problems

Ceylon default constructors in all JPA entities

Was fixed by :
ceylon/ceylon-spec#1405

Ceylon language types not Serializable (for passivating scope)

Was fixed by :
ceylon/ceylon-compiler#2329

JSF conversion error caused by automatic conversion ceylon.language.String -> java.util.String

Basically, because of the automatic conversion I got this error
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9069379/validation-error-value-is-not-valid
Solved by using String? instead of String it deactivates the conversion.
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/ceylon-users/5n6Oidxa-94/ZaQesjNDBgAJ

Hi @sgalles, I'm trying to update the DDDSample to make use of new functionality of 1.3.1.

I think that I should be able to replace the module descriptor with this:

native("jvm")
module dddsample "1.0.0" {
	
	shared import javax.javaeeapi "7.0";
	shared import java.base "8";
	shared import ceylon.interop.java "1.3.1";
	shared import ceylon.json "1.3.1";
	
	// logging
	shared import org.slf4j.api "1.6.1";
	
}

And I think I should just be able to delete the CeylonInit portable extension, and just use --static-metamodel in ceylon war (or ceylon swarm).

However, when I tried this, I could not seem to get the app to deploy correctly on WildFly 10. It seems to get stuck waiting for the JMS queues to start. (There are no errors in the log.)

Any ideas?