Enhanced ear file

The Enhanced EAR is normal J2EE EAR file, but with additional configuration information for resources required by J2EE application.

When an Enhanced EAR is deployed to WebSphere Application Server, WebSphere can automatically configure the resources specified in the Enhanced EAR. This reduces the number of configuration steps required to set up the WebSphere environment to host the application. When an Enhanced EAR is uninstalled, the resources that are defined at the application level scope are removed as well. However, resources defined at a scope other than application level are not removed because they might be in use by other applications Resources created at Application level scope are limited in visibility to only that application.

The supplemental information in an Enhanced EAR is modified by using the WebSphere Enhanced EAR editor, the Deployment tab of the application deployment descriptor in the RAD





When you export any .ear file from either the WAS Admin COnsole or wsadmin script the WAS server will export enhanced ear file for that application. If you open the .ear file you will notice that it has ibmconfig directory under the META-INF directory that has all the configurations required for the .ear file



You can download the sample code from here