Since Tomcat just unzips the EAR to the filesystem to serve the app, what is the benefit of using an EAR and what are the drawbacks to just pushing a filesystem to the Tomcat webapps filesystem?

CodePudding user response：

Tomcat supports WAR but not EAR. Anyways , I think your question is about why we normally deploy the application that is packaged as a single WAR rather than the exploded WAR (i.e exploded deployment).

The main advantages for me are :

• It is more easy to handle the deployment when you just need to deploy one file versus deploying many files in the exploded WAR deployment.

• Because there is only one file get deployed , we can always make sure the application is running in a particular version. If we allow to deploy individual files and someone just update several files to other version , it is difficult to tell what is the exact version that the application is running.

There are already some discussion about such topics before , you can refer this and this for more information.