In my office we use exploded EAR's (and inside them exploded WAR directories) for our test environments, and then a packaged one for production. I've yet to find a good explanation of the reason behind this though. I understand it's easier from a deployment perspective to push out a single file during builds, but it prevents us from doing things like property file changes without doing complete rebuilds (we could skip the compiles, but our environment currently binds the compile and jar processes together).

What are the major advantages / disadvantages between these two configurations?