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It would be nice to have the Java EE 5 story be as descriptor free as possible. steps to reproduce: register a GF domain. Create an Enterprise Application with the complete set of sub projects: web,ejb,appclient. The ejb jar project doesn't have a descriptor. The web-app does, but could probably get by without it... The content of the application-client.xml contains no critical runtime information. It doesn't need to be present for the application client to execute.
This old bug may not be relevant anymore. If you can still reproduce it in 8.2 development builds please reopen this issue. Thanks for your cooperation, NetBeans IDE 8.2 Release Boss