Once the visibility of the applications was set, the decision on where to place the functional units of the application was made. The following factors influenced the decision for the Java(TM) Client Sample Application:
Based on these factors, all the JAR files required by the server application module were placed in the WEB-INF/lib directory, which is the default directory for the JARs for a Web module. The client module contains the set of client views and client operations and requires some resources (configuration files) available in the server side.
The client module also needs a set of Branch Transformation Toolkit functional units to work. You can configure various classpath fields (as a standard java application) to add different JARs to the client module, which works if you launch the client module as a standard java application. However, you can also use a lightweight server container to contain your application client. This approach has an advantage over regular Java applications because it can provide the application client with services that previously were only available to other J2EE components. To support this, WebSphere(R) Application Server provides the Application Client Launcher. This tool uses the MANIFEST classpath entries of the client module to get the other JARs within the enterprise application instead of using the system classpath. For this reason, the Java Client Sample Application has all the functional units needed by the application client are at the enterprise application level and the manifest.mf references them.