What does "handled as loose archive" mean in WebSphere?

Question

Currently, while trying to install an EAR in WebSphere via RSA, I am seeing the following messages:

[11/7/13 15:36:29:897 EST] 00000045 wtp           I org.eclipse.jst.j2ee.commonarchivecore.internal.strategy.Ear50NoDDImportStrategyImpl loadDeploymentDescriptor EAR [ C:\workplaces\communication object manager 20131107\.metadata\.plugins\org.eclipse.wst.server.core\tmp0\ear_communicationObjectManager ] Module [ ejb_communicationObjectManager.jar ] [ 
    EJB Module        [ org.eclipse.jst.j2ee.application.internal.impl.EjbModuleImpl@69a0c5dc ]
    URI               [ ejb_communicationObjectManager.jar ]
    Alt DD            [ null ]
 ] handled as loose archive [ com.ibm.etools.commonarchive.impl.EJBJarFileImpl@38cf53db (URI: ejb_communicationObjectManager.jar, lastModified: 0, size: 0, directoryEntry: <unset>, originalURI: ejb_communicationObjectManager.jar) (types: null) ]

What does this mean, and how does one fix it? Thanks, Peter

Answer 1

I am not sure why this message is being printed unless some debug trace is enabled. You could perhaps open a PMR with IBM to have the message removed or reduced to a debug level.

To answer the question as asked: loose archive (or loose config or loose mapping) are terms used to describe application deployment where the binaries are not stored in the server configuration as a literal zipped .ear file. Most commonly, this is because RAD wants to "redirect" the contents of a module to the workspace so that the entire .ear does not need to be built every time a small change is made to a single class.