Packaging a Java EE Application

Question

I have an Enterprise project (EAR) with one EJB and several web modules, these web modules have lots of classes in common, they are exactly the same for each project, so if I modify one of them I'll have to manually copy the code to the other projects as well. I don't want to put them in my EJB module because they use a lot of front-end related resources.

Is there a way to share these classes between the web projects?

Obs: They also use classes and resources from the EJB module.

Answer 1

Make another module with all commun classes and package it as a Jar. Then add the jar as a dependency to the other project.

Maven should be a good tool for this project.

Answer 2

There is no way to have shared classes outside of a .war which are capable of having web-specific resources injected.

I would refactor the common classes into a separate .jar. You could make them EJBs, or just regular classes. Either way, you won't be able to inject web-specific resources; the classes in .wars will have to pass such things as method parameters. In the case of EJBs, you can't directly pass non-serializable objects like HttpServletRequests; I don't know if that will create a significant impediment.

An EJB .jar can be placed anywhere in the .ear, but if you choose to make a non-EJB .jar, it can be placed in the lib directory of your .ear file. It's also a good place for EJB interfaces, if you aren't writing no-interface EJBs. From the Java EE specification's "Application Assembly and Deployment" chapter:

A .ear file may contain a directory that contains libraries packaged in JAR files. The library-directory element of the .ear file's deployment descriptor contains the name of this directory. If a library-directory element isn't specified, or if the .ear file does not contain a deployment descriptor, the directory named lib is used. An empty library-directory element may be used to specify that there is no library directory.

All files in this directory (but not subdirectories) with a .jar extension must be made available to all components packaged in the EAR file, including application clients. These libraries may reference other libraries, either bundled with the application or installed separately, using any of the techniques described herein.