[MEAR-60] Improve support for skinny war files

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Closed
• Priority: Critical
• Resolution: Fixed
• Affects Version/s: 2.3
• Fix Version/s: 2.7
• Environment: mvn 2.0.5
• Assignee: Dennis Lundberg
• Reporter: Marcel Schutte
• Created: 29/Mar/07 14:49
• Updated: 08/Apr/15 08:03
• Resolved: 08/Jan/12 04:47

Description

Provide a boolean configuration option for webModules to include the war's transitive dependencies.

As described on http://maven.apache.org/plugins/maven-war-plugin/examples/skinny-wars.html it is very common in a J2EE environment to use so called skinny wars. Here the war's WEB-INF/lib will not contain the dependent jars, but instead they are packaged inside the EAR. The war references them through its META-INF/MANIFEST.MF

This option could be used to avoid the 'painful part' mentioned in the above web page. The war's dependencies wouldn't have to be duplicated alongside the ear's.

I also found an old issue (MEAR-14) which has asked for the current default behavior of not including the transitive dependencies. It suggests a property to include specific dependencies of the war. As far as I can tell this has never been implemented and this is also not what I am asking for. My proposal is an all of nothing kind of option for each war module in the ear.

On a side note, for me this is the part where removal of the old maven 1 style properties per dependency is missed the most. With them it was possible to decide for each single dependency whether to put it in WEB-INF/lib or reference it through the manifest classpath. But of course, then we didn't have the transitive dependencies

Issue Links

• is related to: MEAR-75 Incorrect file name in class path (in manifest) if specifying different bundleFileName for module
• is related to: MEAR-183 Extra 'temp' directory created in wrong place
• is related to: MNG-1991 Can't get transitive dependencies from a war pom when this war is added as a depdency of a project
• relates to: MEAR-14 Transitive dependencies of War modules should not be copied in the Ear by default
• relates to: MWAR-9 WAR plugin should support minimal WARs for inclusion within an EAR