JAR WAR Best practices

[Matthew Oatham <ma...@hotmail.com>]

Hi, 

I am building a project which creates many WAR and JAR files for distribution. I have broken these down into two common base files, a WAR and a JAR that all other distributables can extend from. For example:

WAR 1 (base)

WAR 2 (extends base)

I build WAR 1 and it includes 

/WEB-INF/web.xml
/WEB-INF/lib/THIRD_PARTY.jar
/WEB-INF/classes/SOME_CLASSE.class

Now WAR 2 is identical except it overrides web.xml by and requires additional classes. To save time I decided it may be better to copy WAR 1 and extend it by adding the additional classes and overriding web.xml.

Does anyone currently do anything like this? Do you have any suggestions on how I could base my approach? Should I copy or use zipgroupfileset? Any idea appriciated.

Cheers.