Sharing JAR across EAR files?

[tgibson]

I am looking for the best practice for sharing the classes contained in a JAR(in this case these are utility classes) file across multiple EAR deployments. I have looked at the following options:

1.) Specifying the shared jar in the manifest file of EAR files.

2.) Placing classes one EAR file and using JBoss unified class loader to load them in memory.

I have been placing the jar file in the /lib directory however I would these classes to be hot deployable so I am looking to get away for doing this.

TMG

[juha]

For #2 there's no need for an EAR, just drop the JAR into deploy directory.