Difference of purpose of build and dist directories when doing a deploy

I am creating an ant script and I am wondering what 开发者_Go百科should be the name of the directory where I package up the whole kaboodle and make it a .war file and put it in the webapps directory.

Should it be dist or build?

dist.

build is for the .class files only, while dist will include the WEB-INF, META-INF, libraries, etc

Build and dist both contain files created by the build process. But dist contains the ones that you actually want to keep at the end of it.

Build directory is where files are compiled to. Dist directory is used for the distribution files (a place of the resulting package of the application).

In your case it is obviously dist directory.

• Build will have all individual .jar, .war resource files and ejb .ear
• Dist will have distribution files like ear file with all jars and wars inside it.