Professional Oracle® WebLogic Server

Chapter 8. Packaging and Deploying WebLogic Applications

This chapter covers the steps required to package and deploy WebLogic Server applications. Chapter 5 looked at the basic packaging of web applications. This chapter covers how to create enterprise applications from web application and EJB modules; how classloading works in a WebLogic Server application; how to provide common functionality as Java EE optional packages or WebLogic Server shared libraries; and how to include JDBC, JMS, and WLDF resources in the application.

Individual web applications and EJB packages are generically referred to as modules. A Java EE enterprise application is composed of one or more modules, and has an optional deployment descriptor called application.xml. It is packaged in an .ear (Enterprise Archive) file, which can be deployed as a unit to an application server. Web applications and EJBs are by far the most commonly used module types. Java EE defines two other module types: client applications and resource adapters, but we don't cover either of these in any depth. Later in the chapter you see that WebLogic Server allows for other types of modules that contain JDBC, JMS, and WLDF resources, and that enterprise applications can also contain bundled libraries. At the end of this chapter, we show how the bigrez.com application is packaged and deployed.

Creating an EJB Archive File

Just like web applications, EJBs are packaged into archive files to be deployed either standalone to a server or included ...