Answer
An .ear file is an "Enterprise Archive" file. The file has the same format as a regular .jar file (which is the same as ZIP, incidentally). The .ear file contains everything necessary to deploy an enterprise application on an application server. It contains both the .war (Web Archive) file containing the web component of the application as well as the .jar file. In addition there are some deployment descriptor files in XML. http://java.sun.com/j2ee/j2sdkee/techdocs/guides/ejb/html/Overview.fm.html contains additional information.
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Re: Should the .ear be enough to deploy an enterprise bean...
MURALIDHAR KALAVACHARLA, Jan 25, 2002
Frankly speaking I did not use this packaging method as yet. But there seem to be some issues that I came across to know while reading about java packaging. Here is an excerpt from one of those I want to share with the community...
" Currently, the J2EE 1.3 specification defines an enterprise application packaging unit to be a JAR file with an .ear extension. EAR files can contain one or more:
- EJB modules (.jar extension)
- Web application modules(.war extension)
- JCA resource adapter modules (.rar extension)
- Application client modules (.jar extension)
Since most web-based J2EE applications are composed of web and EJB applications, the EAR file meets the basic requirements for packaging an application. However, it is lacking in capability for packaging complicated J2EE applications. For example, the following components are often used in a J2EE application, but cannot be declared in an EAR file:
- Some JMS consumers that run within an application server, such as a MessageConsumer that runs as part of a ServerSession
- JDBC DataSource objects
- JMS ConnectionFactory and Destination objects
- JMX MBeans
- Startup and shutdown classes (admittedly, a propriety extension provided by vendors, but generally unilaterally supplied by all vendors)
Currently, all of these components of an application have to be manually configured and deployed through a vendor's administration interface. As the usage of the items listed above increases over time, it will become more important for EAR files to natively support packaging of these components to achieve true J2EE application portability."
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