Difference between Jar and War packaging with embedded Tomcat

Question

Spring Boot can build executable .jar or .war files. Is there any difference between them, besides the file extension?

The documentation states You should configure your project to build a jar or war (as appropriate). For a Spring MVC web application, is in inappropriate (for technical reasons) to build an executable .jar instead of an executable .war?

Answer 1

Generally speaking, when you're using an embedded container, you should stick to the defaults and build a jar file.

There are, however, two exceptions to that rule:

1. You want to use JSPs. In that case you'll need to use war packaging as Tomcat's JSP support is tightly coupled to the layout of a war file.
2. You want to have the option of also deploying your application to a standalone container or app server.