[catalinb]

What is the best approach to create a Web application project that contains our own code applied on top of an existing product deployed as a
Web application ?
This existing Web Application has for instance a WEB-INF\classes folder with their own classes inside.

[Riyad Kalla]

Do you have the source for the original web application? Because by default Eclipse will clean (erase) the output dir of your project when it builds (/WEB-INF/classes) so if you don’t have the source, as soon as you build that project for the first time, it will erase the classes files.

[catalinb]

Unfortunatelly we do not. The manufacturer of this application , a portal , has decided to package the Web application with both jar files and classes , respectively in WEB-INF/lib and WEB-INF/classes.I tried for the moment to create a Java project with the above classes and in the Web application project I added this classes folder in the build path.This does not seem to work. If I create a jar with the above classes , I may not have the correct classpath. Is there another solution ? Maybe a solution that keeps the vendor’s Web application unchanged and it allows me to create a Web application project just with my own source .

[Riyad Kalla]

I would just package the vendor’s classes dir into a JAr by itself and drop it into the WEB-INF/lib dir. You want to make sure to go into the classes dir, then start compressing from that directory into the JAR, then put that JAR in the WEB-INF/lib dir, and erase the contents of the classes dir.

[catalinb]

Thank you. This will change a little the classloading order inside the Web application.

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