Why to extract war file?

Hello,
I was asked this question in an interview.Why should we create a war and extract the war to webapps.Why not copy the folder directly and run.Please le t me know the answer

Thanks,
Smitha

For easier distribution - it's just a single file to copy. We have a web app that has more than 34000 files; copying those over the network would take a long time.

It's also more orderly to initialize. The servlet engine knwos what to do with a war file, while if you copy individual files, it might try to start initializing the web app as soon as it sees the web.xml file, which may be too soon (because some files are still missing).

how can we extract war file ??? I had tried winRAR, on right-click it give options to further compress it and does not have options like extract etc.

eureka,
>jar -xvf struts2-mailreader.1.1.war

You don't need to extract them.
Tomcat will do it automatically.

Simply drop your war file in the tomcat/webapps directory and Tomcat will take care of the rest.