Hi,
I've just come across some commerical components which are packaged
slightly strangely and I'd like to find out if their approach is J2EE
compliant.

The components are EJBs which are packed into several EJB module
archives (.jars) inside a main application archive (.ear). The
interesting thing is, inside each EJB module .jar, they have packaged
the .class files into several ordinary .jar files and added those .jars
into the EJB .jar, rather than simply adding the classes to the EJB .jar
itself. My question is, is this compliant?

Are application server classloaders suppsed to automatically open such
embedded .jars and make the classes available to the container at
runtime? I don't think so but I have been assured by the vendor in
question that this is compliant (and runs in the J2EE 1.2 RI which I
havn't tested).
There are no directives, either in the J2EE deployment descriptors or
.jar Manifests which can be used to indicate that the 'inner' .jar files
should be unpacked. The Class-Path Manifest attribute can be used to
point to other jars using a relative URI but I don't believe it can be
used to point to .jars inside the referencing .jar. (In any case, this
vendor isn't using a Class-Path attribute)

Any thoughts appreciated!

Regards,

John.

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