how to expose WEB-INF/lib inside war using maven - maven

Question

We are using an 3rd party war in our web app (war). In order to communicate with the war, we have created a bridge module (jar). The intention is to prevent our web app from directly communicating with the external war, but instead communicate through the bridge module.
All the 3 modules (2 wars and 1 jar) are inside an ear file which is deployed in JBoss.
ear
- war1 (our web app)
- war2 (external web app)
- bridge jar
Point to note is, the bridge jar uses some API (exposed as jars), which are present inside the WEB-INF/lib directory of the external war.
At the time of bringing up JBoss, we get java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError errors because the bridge jar is not able to find the API present in external war's WEB-INF/lib.
We do not want to place all external jars directly under ear as it will mean the external jars are not confined only within its war.
Is there a way to access the jars present inside WEB-INF/lib of the external war from the bridge jar? Can we achieve this using maven build process, or is there a better approach to this?

Answer 1

We've had a similar problem recently with our jars not able to see other jars. Resolved it by creating a manifest.mf using the maven-ejb-plugin defined in the pom.xml of the "bridge jar"
2 ways to do this:
a) if bridge jar's pom.xml already has war1 and war2 defined as dependencies - then use maven-ejb-plugin with
<configuration>
<ejbVersion>3.0</ejbVersion>
<archive>
<manifest>
<addClasspath>true</addClasspath>
</manifest>
</archive>
</configuration>
This should autogenerate manifest.mf with a Classpath matching all dependencies defined in the pom
b) else, define your own manifest.mf with the right entries you need and point to it like so
<configuration>
<ejbVersion>3.0</ejbVersion>
<archive>
<manifestFile>src/main/resources/META-INF/MANIFEST.MF</manifestFile>
</archive>
</configuration>
Since your jars are in the WEB-INF/lib of the war1, I think you should go for option 2 with a Manifest containing direct entries such as
Class-Path: WEB-INF/lib/some-external.jar