Copy gdata jars to root dir: `WEB-INF/lib` or to subdirs: `WEB-INF/lib/gdata/blogger/2.0`, etc?

Question

I'm using Google's gdata library. I installed it in my local Maven repository because it is not available from Maven Central using a pom.

I want to move it to my WEB-INF/lib directory so that I do not have to wait for the dozens of "Downloading" messages from Maven each time I restart the server.

However, they are currently in a directory structure like this:

~\wiki\.m2\repository\gdata\base\1.0
~\wiki\.m2\repository\gdata\blogger\2.0
~\wiki\.m2\repository\gdata\books\1.0

If I want to install the jars in my WEB-INF/lib folder so that the pom is not needed, can I copy the entire gdata directory to

WEB-INF/lib

Or should I just copy each jar file one-by-one into the base of the WEB-INF/lib directory rather than:

WEB-INF/lib/gdata/base/1.0
WEB-INF/lib/gdata/blogger/2.0
WEB-INF/lib/gdata/books/1.0

Answer 1

If you create extra folders inside /WEB-INF/lib, they are by default not taken in the servletcontainer's runtime classpath. So, either just don't create those folders (put whole JAR straight in lib), or explicitly add the paths to those new folders to servletcontainer's runtime classpath.