WAR extension strategy in Wildfly

Question

In a WildFly-project, I have a big WAR-File (about 100 MB) which contains the whole application in JAR-Files (EJBs, GUI, Web Services etc)

In this WAR, there are some Functions which implement a custom Function interface (there are also other classes like AbstractFunction and so on). Now I would like to extend the application with user-provided functions (they should be on the class path which can then be accessed by the application.

The problem is that I can't deploy the functions before the main WAR because Function , AbstractFunction etc. are the the WAR which is not yet deployed.

Adding a WildFly module with the functions fails for the same reason.

One possibility would be to restructure the WAR file so that Function , AbstractionFunction are in an own jar which is deployed separately. Unfortunately, this would be a major refactoring which is not possible at the time being.

So is the only (simple) possibility to put the user-defined functions in a JAR into the WAR-file?

Answer 1

You can deploy user code as independent jar/war with EJB. EJB implements Function . Main module can lookup and find them through JNDI. Also you have to make common classes like Function and DTO available for user modules and for main war. The simplest way is share classes from main war. You can add META-INF/jboss-deployment-structure.xml to client modules:

<jboss-deployment-structure xmlns="urn:jboss:deployment-structure:1.2">
<deployment>
    <dependencies>
        <module name="deployment.main.war"/>
    </dependencies>
  </deployment>
</jboss-deployment-structure>

PS

I have similar project with structure:

• core.war contains Plugin interface
• set of plugin*.jar (dependent from core.war)

In my core.war I have code like:

 Plugin srv = (Plugin) new InitialContext().lookup(jndi);

And my plugin looks like:

 @Stateless
 public class UserPlugin implements Plugin

JNDI looks like java:global/user-plugin/UserPlugin