External Libraries

[Former Member]

I'm currently trying to port our application from WebSphere 5 to Netweaver.

One question I have is with external libraries. We have about 30 jar files which we distribute with our application, but we do not include with our EAR file. In WebSphere, I can reference these with a single shared library. I see that NetWeaver has similar features. But I am not clear what is better.

Is it better to use the classpath feature in the application or is it better to set up a Library?

I ran into an issue with using the classpath. My classpath exceeded 1300 characters.

I tried to use a Library, but with the number of jar files, the jar that gets created distribution is huge.

Any suggestions?

Thanks,

Anil

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi Anil,

deploying the JARs as an external library is definitely the right way to do it. Here are just few arguments to support that statement:

-- you have a central library with certain functions. If, in the future, new applications are developed and need to use those functions, you just deploy them with a reference to this library (instead of deploying again the set of JARs with the new EARs).

-- if you need to change anything in the library, you just update it without touching the application(s) that depend on it.

-- even if the library gets huge, you'll get slow deployment of the library archive on the J2EE Engine, but that should not be a pain as it's generally a one-time activity. Just a point here - it's not necessary that all your JARs should go into a single library - you can possibly organize them into several libraries which also depend on each other. This way, you'll overcome the large-library-distribution problem.

Hope that explains things a bit.

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

It would still seem that the additional classpath would accomplish the exact same thing. And it would reduce the need for creating a Jar. Maybe someone could explain what additional classpath is for. Does this add the jar files to the EAR level classloader?

I'm currently trying to develop a command line tool to automate this deployment. (Unfortunately, I have to support other servers so I'm trying to abstract out the deployment process.) So, it would be a bit difficult at a given time to determine what needs to be updated. I'd probably just update everything for the heck of it.

Thanks,

Anil