BACKGROUND

I'm in the process of building a suite of classes for my team to use when authenticating and authorizing users to applications and determining their rights w/i an application. The suite uses Hibernate as our auditing rules require such information in a database setup for such tracking.

The class files that relate to the tables (the ones referenced in the .hbm.xml files) need to be available in some fashion so that the team's code will compile. But they don't actually need the code to develop. They DO need the .har file exported with their application, however.

What I've setup is a .har file containing JUST the .hbm.xml files which is in a separate project they can check out and add as a component to the application .ear (via Eclipse). There are no .class files in this project.

Another project has the .java files and I export them to a .jar of their own which team members then can add to their project class paths via the User Library functionality.

This .jar file of compiled classes I then put in the <jboss-home>/server/default/lib folder and thus far, my application appears to run just fine.

QUESTION

This is the best way to do this?

We have several databases that will be accessed via Hibernate which then requires a .har file - but I don't want to have to redistribute the Java classes over and and over in each project. (That would mean that a change to the library would require a recompile/deploy of every application - something I want to avoid.)

If anyone has any suggestions to the contrary, I would be very interested.

Thanks!