Applications are packaged in one or more contributions. Contributions can be a variety of formats. Fabric3 supports the following formats and can be extended to support others:
- JAR archives
- OSGi bundles
- WAR archives
- ZIP archives
- XML documents
Most applications will be packaged as one or more archives (JAR or WAR). In addition to including application classes and artifacts, a JAR-based contribution may contain an sca-contribution.xml manifest file in the META-INF directory. This manifest file contains contribution metadata, including a list of deployable composites. Deployable composites are those composites that are contained in the contribution which may be deployed to a domain.