J2EE Deployment Models

[Kyle Adams <ka...@gfs.com>]

This is not an Ant-specific question, but I'm not aware of any general 
build/deploy/promotion practices e-mail lists, and this is the closest
thing to that.  If 
someone does know of such a list/newsgroup, let me know and I redirect
my query 
as appropriate.

Our current deployment for J2EE apps is to use an EAR.  Inside the
EAR's base 
directory, we have a lib directory, which contains JARs that the EJB
JARs may 
reference in their Class-Path entry (ie, fop.jar, log4j.jar, etc.). 
Also within the base 
directory are all the WARs and EJB JARs that make up the EAR.

We have a third party source providing us with an EAR that uses a
radically 
different deployment model, and I'd be curious to hear opinions and
thoughts on it.  
Within the EAR the application is split up into three different
groupings: 
presentation, common, and service tiers.  Each group is a JAR file,
containing 
within it whatever EJB JARs or WARs fall within that logical grouping. 
So there are 
3 layers of packging that occur - the EJBs and WARs get wrapped up into
a 
generic JAR by group, and then the 3 groups composing the application
get 
wrapped up into an EAR.

As build manager and deployer, our build, deploy, and promotion
processes (and by 
that, I mean the automated scripts, including Ant files) would face
signifigant 
change to support this new model.  I also have concerns about how
standard or 
non-standard this type of deployment model is.  We really try to stick
close to the 
specs for J2EE and avoid anything that ties us to non-standard
practices, or 
vendor lock-in.

Thoughts?


Thanks,

Kyle Adams
Developer, Gordon Food Service