# Packaging

We had a brief discussion on the `jboss-beans.xml` file in examples. In this chapter, we will go into more depth on the packaging topic. As we will see later in standalone , the packaging is more of a convention rather than a requirement. The convention is recommended since it allows "deployments" to be used both standalone and inside JBoss AS.

The basic structure of Microcontainer deployment is a plain .jar file (see below). The jar archive can also be unpacked in a directory structure that looks the jar file. It contains a `META-INF/jboss-beans.xml` to describe what you want it to do. The contents of this xml file are described in basics . Finally, the archive contains the classes and any resources just like any other jar file.

          example.jar/
          example.jar/META-INF/jboss-beans.xml
          example.jar/com/acme/SomeClass.class

If you want to include a .jar file in an `.ear` deployment, you will need to reference it in `META-INF/jboss-app.xml` .

       <xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?>

          <!DOCTYPE jboss-app
             PUBLIC "-//JBoss//DTD J2EE Application 1.4//EN"
             "http://www.jboss.org/j2ee/dtd/jboss-app_4_0.dtd">

          <jboss-app>

             <module>
                <service>example.jar</service>
             </module>

          </jboss-app>