What is an EAR archive?

An EAR archive is used to deploy standalone EJBs, usually separated from the web application. Thus, there is no need for a web application to access these EJBs. The EJBs are still accessible though using EJB clients.

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The EAR Plugin throws an exception when encountering artifact types it is unfamiliar with. Is this a bug?

The exception can be prevented by adding your custom artifact type to the artifactTypeMappings configuration. There is a mini-guide on how to do that in the modules configuration section.

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How can I avoid to generate a display-name entry in the generated application.xml?

By default, the plugin will always generate a display-name with the id of the project if a custom one is not provided through configuration. If for some reason you don't want any display-name at all, just use the ${null} value instead.

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When should one use the modules configuration?

By default, the EAR plugin generates sensible defaults for all the JavaEE dependencies it finds in the current project. The modules configuration is useful if you need to customize something such as the bundle location, context root, etc.

Adding a module entry with only the groupId and artifactId of a dependency is therefore useless.

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