Installing Java applications (WAR)

Hi All,

This discussion also applies to SAR, RAR, EAR etc., things that have 
JARs and config files inside.

Debian started looking into this, the ideas are good, need some details 
to be worked out (I have them in
my mind but rather not influence you).  Fedora is also analyzing the 
document, so we should do the same.

Please read:

http://lists.debian.org/debian-java/2010/12/msg00014.html

This has always annoyed us and we have partially solved the problem by 
requiring the apps to be
installed "exploded" (i.e., a war directory, not a .war file).  It does 
not solve the compliance with
the file system specs though.  And the sharing of apps in different 
containers is also not addressed.

When reading note the following caveat:  It is not only changes in the 
app itself that cause the need
for deployment.  A change in one of the libraries used (in the apps lib 
directory) also matters, so they
must still be deployed exploded and have the JARs as symlinks (so they 
are automatically "fixed" if
we upgrade the library package).  If the server will detect that and 
redeploy the app will depend on the
server of course  --  if we were on Java 8 with modules we could even 
try and handle that, but that is
for JPP8 ;-)

Regards to all,
Fernando