Deploying .ear file to tomcat

Question

I have an .ear file which contains multiple war files.

I am moving the app to tomcat. Once I have packaged all of the individual war files contained in the .ear for tomcat compatability how will the war files be deployed ?

Do I just need to deploy all of the individual war files to tomcat and it should "just work" or is it not as simple as this ?

To be more specific what is the tomcat equivalent "glue" that websphere provides to package all the wars in one ear?

Solution

Tomcat doesn't support the full EE stack, it's a servlet container only. You'll have to deploy the WARs separately.

Comments

[blue-sky]

How will the wars relate to each other ? What is the tomcat equivalent "glue" that websphere provides to package all the wars in one ear?

[Peter Svensson]

Short answer: there isn't ... The java EE specs is what you want to read if you want to understand the deployment structure of an EE application .

[blue-sky]

Ok, so say I have an ear which contains two wars - war1 & war2. I convert the war1 & war2 to tomcat compatibly and deploy both wars to tomcat. Are you saying the two wars project structure will need to be amended to a single war file structure ?

[Peter Svensson]

No you can deploy multiple wars in Tomcat.

[blue-sky]

Maybe I am asking the same question in a different way but why are multiple war packaged in an ear file, why not just deploy each war separately. I'm just a little unsure as to how to understand how each war relates to each other, maybe this relationship is unique for all .ear files?

[Peter Svensson]

Read up on the specs. Basically the EAR can contain multiple WARs, EJB jars and connector RARs. The EAR file can also contain common libs used by the contained components (minimize total size by not packaging all libs in every WAR for instance)...