[ https://issues.jboss.org/browse/WFLY-10847?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin... ] Brad Maxwell commented on WFLY-10847: ------------------------------------- Typically in JavaEE the spec talks about applications as being an ear or a war. Practically though customers deploy ejb.jars, wars, ears, rars, etc. And ear is a packaging mechanism to package up multiple sub deployments. An ear could be considered a single application, but that does not mean it has a single entry point, it could be exposing many services such as EJBs that can be invoked inVM or remotely as well as it could be exposing web applications / JAXRS/ JAXWS web services. I looked around and am not clear on what it means to have 1 tracer, but looking at OpenTrace it looks like showing workflow or such? I think since an ear could be considered 1 application, it might also be used to hold multiple applications that have many services and just used to share some libraries. The very simple typical example would be: application.ear - web-app.war - backend-ejb.jar browser -> http://host:8080/web-app/ -> Servlet1 in web-app.war -> EJB1 in backend-ejb browser -> http://host:8080/web-app/ -> Servlet2 in web-app.war -> EJB2 in backend-ejb -> EJB3 in backend-ejb But most customers have more than a single war/ejb such as: application.ear - web-app.war - web-app2.war ... - backend-service-1-ejb.jar - backend-service-2-ejb.jar ... But then services inside of application.ear might also call services in application2.ear deployed on the same server. application2.ear - backend-service-3-ejb.jar - backend-service-4-ejb.jar More complex use cases would involve multiple servers where services in an application.ear might call services on the same JVM but then call remote services on another JVM. -- This message was sent by Atlassian JIRA (v7.5.0#75005)