WebLogic: The Definitive Guide

Assembling and Deploying Resource Adapters

Resource adapters can be packaged and deployed in very much the same way as you would package and deploy web applications or EJB components. A resource adapter includes all the Java classes and interfaces that implement the required contracts and functionality. It also may use platform-specific libraries that enable it to talk to the EIS. All these files, along with any help files and documentation, are packaged into a JAR file, called the resource adapter archive (RAR). Just like a WAR file or an EJB JAR, a RAR file also packages XML deployment descriptors, which specify the deploy-time and runtime configuration settings for the resource adapter.

Packaging

A typical RAR includes the following components:

• One or more JARs that contain all the Java interfaces, implementation, and utility classes required by the resource adapter.

• Any platform-dependent libraries needed by the resource adapter.

• Help files and documentation.

• XML deployment descriptors (ra.xml and weblogic-ra.xml) that encapsulate metadata and various configuration settings for the resource adapter. The XML descriptor files must be placed in the META-INF directory.

Example 7-1 lists the contents of a typical RAR file.

Example 7-1. Contents of a resource adapter module (eis.rar)

/ra.jar
/cci.jar
/win.dll
/solaris.so
/Overview.html
/GettingStarted.html
/ReleaseNotes.html
/LICENSE.txt
/META-INF/ra.xml
/META-INF/weblogic-ra.xml

Here, ra.jar and cci.jar contain the Java classes ...