Best way of sharing JARS

General
1

Hi guys!

I’d like to have your opinions on pros and cons of these two ways to share JARs across multiple projects in
Tomcat
with
Liferay
.


1 - Vaadin 6 standard way

Insert all the utility JARs that I need for all projects into Liferay libs (ROOT/WEB-INF/lib), and take a copy of everyone in each project using the
liferay-plugin-package.properties
, like it is for vaadin.jar


2 - customizing Class Loader

Remove the vaadin.jar from Liferay lib and all liferay-plugin-package.properties, taking only one centralized copy into the Tomcat Common Libraries, among with all the utility JARs which must be reachable to all project.
Create a new Class which extends ApplicationPortlet2 and overrides the getCLassLoader method in this way:

 protected ClassLoader getClassLoader() throws ServletException {
        return Thread.currentThread().getContextClassLoader();
    }

Replacing the standard
portlet-class
 in the
portlet.xml
 files with this new Class

In each way portlets look to work fine, as long I have tested, but which solution do you think could be the best and why?

Thanks in advance for your opinions.

2

The safest (and most common) way is 1) - use WEB-INF/lib; you’ll note that this is not (specifically) the Vaadin standard way, but the J2EE standard way.

By using WEB-INF/lib, you’ll be able to deploy applications with different versions of jars (which is sometimes necessary). It also makes it very easy to build and deploy web applications (as it possible to create a single web application directory/war file containing everything that can be deployed). This ease of deployment means you can also pick up a standard WAR file and deploy it in Jetty, Tomcat, Websphere, Weblogic, OC4J, Winstome - or any other standard J2EE web application with no changes whatsoever - usually just by placing the WAR file in a directory.

In short - unless you have a concrete reason to do so (disk space on an embedded device?) - I’d strongly suggest using WEB-INF/lib.

Cheers,

Charles.

3

Thanks Charles. :slight_smile: