[henk53]

> JavaEE somehow associates with managing applications through the Application Server’s admin panel,

That is a wrong association really.

Even in the really old versions of GlassFish and JBoss such an admin panel was just an extra (I hate them too, btw).

You could always, Tomcat style, just copy your .war to a deployment folder. If you wanted, you could also zip up GlassFish with the war already in that folder and deploy that.

> registering EJBs with deployment descriptors

That was required for the last time in J2EE 1.4, from 2003 or so. Already in Java EE 5 from 2005 that wasn't necessary anymore. Also don't forget that spring beans needed to be registered in very similar deployment descriptors (huge xml files) just as well.