After finishing the build using the RPM system, you get an RPM file, which is a very convenient type of deployment artifact for operating systems based on Red Hat. For Debian-based distributions, you get a .deb file.

The final output from a Maven build is usually an enterprise archive, or EAR file for short. This contains Java Enterprise applications.

It is final deployment artifacts such as these that we will later deploy to our production servers.

In this chapter, we concern ourselves with building the artifacts required for deployment, and in Chapter 7, Deploying the Code, we talk about the final deployment of our artifacts.

However, even when building our artifacts, we need to understand how to deploy them. At the moment, we will use the following rule of thumb: OS-level packaging is preferable to specialized packaging. This is my personal preference, and others might disagree.

Let's briefly discuss the background for this rule of thumb as well as the alternatives.

As a...