EAR specification

Question

What is a valid EAR? Can someone direct me to a specification? We are building an EAR using ant's ear task. This ear deploys and runs fine on both JBoss 3.0 and JRun 4. But when we run Sun's verifier tool from J2EE 1.3.1 there is a NullPointerException, apparently trying to read a library jar. This happens also if the jar in question is extracted and verified. The library jar contains only plain Java classes. There are also some ERRORS and WARNINGS on the ejb.jar too.
We we want to make our application verify and deploy on the RI server. Can someone help?
Thanks,
-Richard Brewster

Answer 1

Richard,
The following is the DTD for the application.xml file in the META_INF path:
http://java.sun.com/dtd/application_1_3.dtd
If you have installed and started the J2EE RI server, you should be able to access the following DTD for the sun-j2ee-ri.xml file in the same path:
http://localhost:8000/sun-j2ee-ri_1_3.dtd
Problems with trying to access library jars can sometimes be due to the security permissions on the server. You might need to add the following to your server.policy and/or client.policy files in $J2EE_HOME/lib/security/ path:
grant
   java.lang.RuntimePermission "loadLibrary.*";
}If you know the library you wish to load and still wish to restrict access to other libraries, replace the * with the name of the library.
This should get you started. Without knowing the exact nature of the errors and warnings its pretty hard to help any further.
Ben New
[email protected]
Leftclick Software Development
http://www.leftclick.com.au/