The ear service allows deployment of complete Java EE applications (including ejb-jar, war and rar files packed in an ear file). This service is based on the web service for deploying the included wars, the ejb2 or ejb3 service for deploying the EJB containers for the included ejb-jars and the resource service for deploying the included rars.

In development mode, as all other Java EE archives ear archives can be deployed automatically as soon as they are copied under $JONAS_BASE/deploy (or under another configuration-defined directory) and undeployed as soon as they has been removed from this location.

Here is the part of jonas.properties concerning the ear service:

###################### JOnAS EAR service configuration
#
#  Set the name of the implementation class of the ear service.
jonas.service.ear.class    org.ow2.jonas.ear.internal.JOnASEARService

#  Set the XML deployment descriptors parsing mode for the EAR service
#  (with or without validation).
jonas.service.ear.parsingwithvalidation    true             

# Generate stubs for all EJBs that may be accessed from the application
# In almost all cases, this is not required to be enabled as stubs can be found.
jonas.service.ear.genstub    true

# Create a child classloader when deploying EJB3 of the EAR
jonas.service.ear.useEJB3ChildClassloader    true