In SCA, 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 

JAR contributions

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The Fabric3 Contribution Plugin

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Contribution Imports and Exports

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• XML resource sharing
• Java package sharing
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In both cases, a resource (or set of resources) are exported by one contribution and imported by another. Imports and exports are specified in the contribution manifest file.

XML Resource Sharing

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Java Package Sharing

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Fabric3 and OSGi Classloading

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OSGi Bundles

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WAR Archives

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Excluding Contribution Contents

Sometimes it is necessary to exclude contents of a contribution from being scanned. For example, generated XML files that contain invalid markup. Exclude patters can be specified using the <scan> element from the Fabric3 namespace in an sca-contribution.xml manifest with a REGEX pattern:
<contribution ....>
<f3:scan exclude=".*\.ds\.xml"/>
</contribution>This chapter covers application and runtime packaging, including best practices for preparing code for deployment.