This chapter describes the packaging. As we will see later in the standalone chapter, this is more of a convention rather than a requirement.

The convention is recommended since it allows "deployments" to be used both standalone and inside JBossAS.

The basic structure of microcontainer deployment is a .beans file (which can also be unpacked - a directory structure that looks the jar file). It also contains a META-INF/jboss-beans.xml to describe what you want it to do. The contents of this xml file are described in the basic configuration chapter.

Finally, it contains the classes and any resources just like any other jar file.

example.beans/
example.beans/META-INF/jboss-beans.xml
example.beans/com/acme/SomeClass.class

If you want to include a .beans file in an .ear deployment, you will need to reference in META-INF/jboss-app.xml

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?>

<!DOCTYPE jboss-app
  PUBLIC  "-//JBoss//DTD J2EE Application 1.4//EN"
          "http://www.jboss.org/j2ee/dtd/jboss-app_4_0.dtd"
>

<jboss-app>

   <module><service>example.beans</service></module>
   
</jboss-app>