I filed a glassfish bug -- when reading it, perhaps the bug is actually with Netbeans.  Netbeans creates an Application Client Container (ACC) application which runs correctly:

https://netbeans.org/kb/docs/javaee/entappclient.html

However, when the resulting EAR is deployed, the appclient cannot be launched because the JAR doesn't contain a manifest. 

The error is along the lines of:



org.glassfish.appclient.client.acc.UserError: ACC007: The app client file
/__JWSappclient/__app/SingletonQueue/SingletonQueueClient/
SingletonACCClient.jar does not contain a manifest; the app client
container cannot process it. Embedded programs should pass URIs with
scheme "jar:" for JAR files and scheme "file:" for directories.


While it's possible that this is my error, the sheer number of problems without solutions, or even references to documentation, indicated that there's a problem with netbeans, glassfish, or the documentation.