Chapter 13. Packaging and Deployment

Configuring a persistence application involves specifying the bits of information, additional to the code, that the execution environment or persistence platform may require in order for the code to function as a runtime application. Packaging means putting all the pieces together in a way that makes sense and can be correctly interpreted and used by the infrastructure when the application is deployed into an application server or run in a stand-alone JVM. Deployment is the process of getting the application into an execution environment and running it.

One could view the mapping metadata as part of the overall configuration of an application, but we won't cover that in this chapter because it has already been discussed in previous chapters. In this chapter, we will be discussing the primary runtime persistence configuration file, persistence.xml, which defines persistence units. We will go into detail about how to specify the different elements of this file, when they are required, and what the values should be.