Component artifacts provide a piece of business (or other high level) functionality by bundling a set of services that are defined in library artifacts. Components follow the naming scheme "<componentKey>-component.jar. The component artifact cae-component.jar for example, bundles all services that are typically required by a CAE web application based project.

Component artifacts are automatically activated on application startup, in contrast to library artifacts. That is, Spring beans and properties are loaded into the application context and servlets and so on will be instantiated. Therefore, you can add a component by simply adding a Maven dependency. No additional steps (such as adding an import to a Spring file) are necessary.

The following files allow you to declare services for a component which are automatically activated: