I need some advice on how to tackle this problem...and I'm not sure the way I approached it was correct...
I have a .war that contains my application and it is deployed in our Jboss server in the deploy directory. Inside that war, I have a WEB-INF/lib directory that holds all my .jar files as well as third party .jars that we use.
Now, I want to enable someone to write their own, self contained .jar file that has one class that implements an interface that I publish. Taking that jar and dropping it in the same lib file, the classes/interfaces wire up perfectly. My issue is, that plugin .jar also has some third party libraries that need to be deployed. Can I not have these third party .jars nested in the plugin .jar? If I explode/extract the plugin's jars and toss them in the lib directory, that will work, but I'd rather not force people to do that.
Also, will I have class loading issues if they use a different version of the jar that my application is using out of the box?
Please advise,
Aaron
So looking at it more...
What I really want to do is drop a jar in my .war. I want this .jar to contain other jars and reference those other jars in its manifest file. I'm wondering though if that's even possible?