debate: Is adding third party libraries to a war a good idea?

Question

We have a debate going on .

a. The "standard" way of assembling a web app. Create a WAR with all our app artifacts and all other components like hibernate and memcached etc are deployed in the tomcat/shared/lib area.

b. Create a humongous war with everything included and nothing in tomcat/shared/lib.

Pros for a - It keeps things modular and the war is small. Cons for a - dependency on shared/lib has to be managed especially by the deployment process.

Pros for b - All dependencies are controlled by the build process removing any room for error. Cons for b - War is really, really big. If you are deploying over a network to a huge farm, then it might have an impact.

want to see what thoughts others might have about this.

Answer 1

Actually, I thought B was the "standard" way :-)

I choose B nearly all the time. It's simpler for our customers - many of whom don't have skills administering java application servers - they just drop the WAR in to the place I tell them to and everything works.

It also works well with our build and deploy - the WAR is built using maven, so all necessary dependencies are included, and also can be deployed to our QA app servers using the cargo plugin.

It also avoids "WAR-hell" when you have several webapps requiring hibernate or some other dependency, but different versions.

I would choose A only when I cam in total control of the app server, and the overhead of duplicating the common libraries per webapp becames prohibitively large, or that I am able to ensure all the apps are tested with the same version of the dependencies. Then, I know the dependencies can be safely moved into the shared area of the app server.