Overview

Copyright © Cloud Software Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Chapter 3 Creating an Archive for Deployment : Overview

Overview

During development, you save your design to a project repository as needed. When you are ready to deploy your project to a machine, you must generate an Enterprise archive file (EAR file) using TIBCO Designer.

The EAR file contains information on the resources you wish to deploy. This includes one or more TIBCO ActiveMatrix BusinessWorks process definitions and the associated shared resources required by the process definitions.

Building an archive creates the EAR file that you can then deploy from TIBCO Administrator. If you make changes to the business processes or shared resources included in the archive, you must rebuild and redeploy the archive. Saving the project does not affect the archive.

You can define multiple Enterprise Archive resources for a single Designer project. For each archive, you can choose the processes to include.

Enterprise Archive File Size

An EAR file can contain local project resources, LibraryBuilder resources, and files as specified in AliasLibrary resources. In addition, the TIBCO Designer classpath may include references to other files that are included in the EAR file. The EAR file size may become an issue when you build it in TIBCO Designer, load it into TIBCO Administrator and deploy it to remote machines.

An EAR file should only include resources that are required to deploy the project. Large archive files can have a negative effect at deployment. If each application in your project uses different resources, different AliasLibrary resources should be used by each application (rather than one large AliasLibrary).

•

You should insure that the machine on which the EAR file is loaded and deployed has sufficient disk space.

•

TIBCO Designer displays a warning when you add a directory to an EAR file, or alias to an AliasLibrary that references a directory. The EAR file size is typically one fifth of the warning, due to file compression. The warning reminds you that when referencing a directory, all files and sub directories in the directory are archived.

You can modify the following property in designer.tra so that the warning appears only when files of the given size are loaded. The value is in megabytes.

designer.ear.watermark.size=16

This property specifies when the warning message should appear. For example, if you change the value to 32, the warning only appears if you are loading a files that are greater than 32 MB.

If the warning appears, you must understand the consequence of loading the files. You may need to increase the heap size value in designer.tra so Designer has enough memory to manage the project. At deployment, TIBCO Administrator copies the EAR file and deployment files to remote machines. If the EAR file is large, copying files may take extra time.

It is good practice to load only the files you need for your project. For example, if you require only one jar file of 500KB that exists in a directory that contains 20 MB of jar files, you should create an alias that references only the required jar rather than the entire directory.