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
