Building an Application File

The end product of the Project design process is an application file that can be deployed to an application server. This enterprise archive (.ear) file contains a collection of .jar files, classes, and resources. In the case of a web application, the corresponding web archive (.war) file contains a group of .jar files, classes, and resources that can be packaged and accessed as a single servlet context.

Once a Deployment Profile has been defined for your Project, you can build the .ear or .war file by clicking the Build button in the Deployment Editor toolbar. You can also generate an .ear file from the command line, without having NetBeans running.

The resulting .ear or .war file is stored in the following directory:

CAPS_install_dir\.netbeans\caps\builds\DeploymentNameProjectName\logicalhost\appserver

Note - By default, the .ear file does not contain the associated Java source files. For the Java source files to appear in the .ear file, you need to set the value of the NetBeans run.mode property to debug before building the file. You do this by setting a command-line switch in the following file:

CAPS_install_dir\netbeans\etc\netbeans.conf

Add “-J-Drun.mode=debug” to the series of entries following netbeans_default_options=. Note that the resulting .ear file can be quite large.