What is an exploded EAR?

Question

Can someone please explain what's an exploded EAR ? I checked in google but couldn't find a clear answer. Is it a different format?

What's the difference to a non exploded EAR?

Answer 1

A compressed EAR file, with extension .ear is just a ZIP file containing the directory structure of a JEE project. It is normally used in order to deploy a JEE project.

An exploded EAR file is just the uncompressed content of the above.

Incidentally speaking, war and jar files are also compressed in ZIP format.

The use of the wording "Exploding" instead of "decompressing" a ZIP file seems to be traditional in the java community, and is present in official documentation.

E.g.: www.java2s.com/Code/Java/File-Input-Output/classforexplodingjarzipfilesontothefilesystem.htm (on a IBM contributed source file belonging to Eclipse ).

They can be exploded with the jar command.

You can also use any compression utility, provided you keep the directory structure intact.

e.g.:

jar xvd /myapp_path/myapp.ear