J2EE.9.6 Packaging and Deployment

Application clients are packaged in JAR files and include a deployment descriptor similar to other J2EE application components. The deployment descriptor describes the enterprise beans and external resources referenced by the application. As with other J2EE application components , access to resources must be configured at deployment time, names assigned for enterprise beans and resources, etc.

The tool used to deploy an application client, and the mechanism used to install the application client, is not specified. Very sophisticated J2EE products may allow the application client to be deployed on a J2EE server and automatically made available to some set of (usually intranet) clients. Other J2EE products may require the J2EE application bundle containing the application client to be manually deployed and installed on each client machine. And yet another approach would be for the deployment tool on the J2EE server to produce an installation package that could be taken to each client to install the application client. There are many possibilities here and this specification doesn't prescribe any one; it only defines the package format for the application client and the things that must be possible during the deployment process.

How an application client is invoked by an end user is unspecified. Typically a J2EE product provider will provide an application launcher that integrates with the application client machine's native operating system, but the level of such integration is unspecified.