Section 23.1. What you Will Learn

23.1. What you Will Learn

• What is in an EAR.

• How to build an EAR by hand.

• How to integrate some of the tools we've covered before (CVS and Ant) to automate this and avoid having to build an EAR by hand.

• How to deploy an EAR to JBoss.

• How to deploy an EAR to Geronimo.

Some people may wonder why anyone would want to describe to you how to build an EAR by hand. The task of constructing such things is increasingly automated, often performed by IDEs, Ant, or J2EE containers or related tools. So why the grubby details of doing it yourself? Two reasons, really. First, if you hide behind the tool, you never fully understand what is happening. It looks too much like magic, and you're helpless if the magic fails. Secondly, seeing how it works inside out gives you a better understanding of what is going on and even empowers you to do a custom version for your project. If this discussion sounds familiar, it may be because you read something similar about IDEs in Chapter 10.