Jesper Pedersen wrote:
No, an .ear is an .ear as defined by EE 6.
In the script you will setup the needed resources like datasources, JMS queues and topics, EJB pool sizes and so on through the standard management interface. Everything that is exposed by the management API you have access to.
That could indeed be interesting yes, and would give archives a lot more options than we have today.
Tooling is a minor problem, since it is a "standard" JAR archive format.
This is the part I have some doubts about. In Eclipse you would e.g. check out a project from a repository, go to your Servers view, add the project to a server and start it. The WTP server adaptor will then assemble the ear and deploy it. Changes to individual files will be hot deployed.
It's this workflow that I found to be important to a lot of developers and that I'm trying to preserve.
If the EAR would contain the instructions, this would be trivial to support (not only in Eclipse, but other IDEs as well). Specifically for Eclipse it might be an option to talk with the JBoss tools guys to see how open they are about optionally assembling such a .cli archive instead of a .ear.