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Overview

The Geronimo-specific deployment plan for a Web application, which is usually packaged as a WAR file, is called "geronimo-web.xml". The geronimo-web.xml deployment plan is used to in conjunction with the web.xml JAVA EE deplopyment plan to deploy web applications consisting of Java Servlet Pages (JSP) and servlets to the Geronimo application server, and optionally can be used to configure the Geronimo web server (i.e., Tomcat or Jetty) where the Web application is going to be deployed. The geronimo-web.xml deployment plan is an optional file, but is typically used when deploying a WAR file. It is used to specify the application security roles, ejb names, database resources, JMS resources, etc. declared in web.xml to corresponding entities deployed in the server. In addition to that, if there are any web container specific configurations, such as Tomcat or Jetty specific, depending on the application needs, all these settings are configured as well here. If the web application depends on any third party libraries or other services running in the server, all these dependencies are declared in the plan. Some web applications require class loading requirements different from the default class loading behavior. The geronimo-web.xml allows application deployer to configure this as well. There are many more configurations that could be done through geronimo-web.xml depending on the needs of web application.

Packaging

The geronimo-web.xml Geronimo-specific deployment plan can be packaged as follows:

1. Embedded in a WAR file. In this case, a the geronimo-web.xml file must be placed in the /WEB-INF directory of the WAR, which is the same place where the web.xml file must be located.
2. Maintained separately from the WAR file. In this case, the path to the file must be provided to the appropriate Geronimo deployer (e.g., command-line or console) when the WAR file is deployed. Note that in this case, the filename can may be named something other than geronimo-web.xml but must adhere to the same schema. Also note that this will not work if the EJB JAR file is to be embedded in an enterprise application EAR file (see below).
3. Embedded in an enterprise application EAR file: In one case, the high-level element <web-app> can be embedded outside the WAR file in the EAR file's geronimo-application.xml file.
4. Embedded in an enterprise application EAR file: In another case, the actual geronimo-web.xml file can be placed in the /META-INF directory of the EAR, which is the same location as the application.xml file.

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