How do I organise my libraries in sub-directories in a web application project

Question

I am working on a huge web-application with hundreds of dependencies (jar files). I want to organise the jars in sensible way as each piece of software comes with its bunch of jar files and when I want to remove or upgrade version of that software it will be easier to do if kept in sub directories.

Problem is that when using a web-server (I'm using tomcat), all libs need to be under WEB-INF/lib folder, you cannot create subdirectories otherwise it doesn't load the jars in subdirectories.

Thanks.

Answer 1

How about exploring Maven for managing your dependencies and creating your WAR file for you? This way you would not necessarily have to care how they are organized.