These parent-relationship just is a convienence option. We use it to just deploy our core stand-alone and allow our customers to deploy own applications which use the core's api.
Btw. OracleAS still uses a own ClassLoader for each app and loads the jars of the core into the applications so there isn't a real shared class loader it just simulates this behaviour for the applications which use the parent flag.
As we use spring and no EJB our ears only consist of simple web applications, so deploying a big ear with all the wars in it just might do the trick.
regards,
Ingo
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