RE: Newbie Question Number One

> From: Mark Phippard
>
> Instead of linking those external JAR files to your project by
> setting the
> Java Build Path properties on the project, you have to physically copy
> them to the /WEB-INF/lib folder of your web application.  This will cause
> them to automatically be in both your build path as well as your runtime
> classpath.  And, of course, since they are now physically a part of your
> project they will also be exported to your ear file.

Okay, so if I have many applications, and they use the same external JARs, I
have to copy those JARs to every /WEB-INF/lib folder of every application.

And on the PC side, that means that every developer has to make sure that
they have the appropriate JAR files in their /WEB-INB/lib folder for every
application.  And while I assume some of the more aggressive change
management tools handle this, the manual effort involved to keep all these
environments in sync could be rather large, couldn't it?

It would be so much easier to simply have everybody point to a shared drive
where the common JAR files reside, and pick those up when generating an EAR
file.

Joe