Packaging Java Enterprise Edition applications
We have learned how to create ZIP, TAR, and JAR archives with Gradle in this chapter and the previous one. In a Java project we can also package our applications as Web application Archive (WAR) or Enterprise Archive (EAR) files. For a web application we would like to package our application as a WAR file, while a Java Enterprise Edition application can be packaged as an EAR file. Gradle also supports these types of archives with plugins and tasks.
Creating a WAR file
To create a WAR file we can add a new task of type War to our Java project. The properties and methods of the War task are the same as for the other archive tasks such as Jar. In fact, the War task extends the Jar task.
The War task has an extra method, webInf(), to define a source directory for the WEB-INF directory in a WAR file. The webXml property can be used to reference a web.xml file that needs to be copied into the WAR file. This is just another way to include a web.xml...
