GWT web-app vs system classpath for dynamic loaded classes

Question

In my GWT web app I am keeping all my jar files outside of my project and referencing them using classpath variables. This allows me to link to jars from other projects/team

Answer 1

I don't think, there's a nicer way - using this makeshift "self-healing" mechanism of the GWT Jetty/dev mode is already a hack :) If you ever have the need to run the server side code on e. g. JBoss during development (together with GWT dev mode for the client side), this will stop working.

(As an additional problem, the order of classloading - and consequently the precedence in cases when there are multiple versions of a class in different jars - will depend on program flow. This can be very nasty to debug.)

You mention, that you pull in all the jars from outside. What I would do in that case, is to set .svnignore (or .gitignore/...) to "*.jar" in the WEB-INF/lib dir. Then I'd run the same build step which is used to create the production build to copy the jars into the lib dir before starting the server.