How does a J2EE application explodes into an OC4J after deployment?

A typical application directory structure during development is as shown in the figure.

When you deploy your application, the following occurs:

1. OC4J opens up and parses application.xml that exists in the EAR file. The application.xml lists all the modules that are contained in the EAR file. OC4J notes these modules and initializes the EAR environment.

2. OC4J reads the module deployment descriptors of each modules. The J2EE descriptors & OC4J-specific deployment descriptors are read into memory. Then JAR & WAR environments are initialized.

3. If you do not provide OC4J -specific deployment descriptor, OC4J provides one with certain defaults.

4. Then OC4J writes out the new module deployment descriptors to the application-deployments directory. These are the descriptors that Oc4J uses for starting and restarting the applications.

5. The OC4J then copies the EAR file to the "master" directory. This defaults to "applications" directory.

6. Finally, OC4J updates the server.xml with the notation that this application has been deployed. Each existing application contains a line with an
'<'application name=... path=... auto-start="true" '/>' entry.

7. In default-web-site.xml, a '<'web-app...'>' entry exists for each Web application that is bound to the Web site upon OC4J startup.
For each Web application binding included in a WAR file, the following line has been added:
'<'web-app application="myapp" name="myapp-web" root="/myapp" '/>'