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

Most SCA applications will be packaged as one or more JARs. 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. A contribution may contain other composites but if they are not marked as deployable, they may not be directly included in the domain (i.e. they may only be used by a deployable composite). An example sca-contribution.xml file is shown below:

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<contribution xmlns="http://docs.oasis-open.org/ns/opencsa/sca/200912" xmlns:sample="urn:tempuri.org">
   <deployable composite="sample:TheComposite"/>
</contribution>

Applications often require third-party libraries. Fabric3 supports two ways of packaging and deploying these libraries: by embedding them in the JAR; and importing them from another contribution. Similar to WARs, Fabric3 allows contribution JARs to bundle third-party libraries by placing their JARs in the META-INF/lib directory of the contribution. Any JAR placed in the META-INF/lib directory will be made available on the contribution classpath.

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.