How to extend/customize a WAR with another project

Question

We have the following scenario with our project:

• A core web application packaged as a war file (call it Core project).
• The need to "customize" or "extend" the core app per customer (call it Customer project). This mostly includes new bean definitions (we're using Spring), ie. replacing service implementations in the core.war with customer-specific implementations.
• We want to develop the Core and Customer projects independently
• When the Customer project is developed, we need to be able to run/debug it in Eclipse (on Tomcat) with the Core project as a dependency
• When the Customer project is built, the resulting war file "includes" the core and customer projects. So this .war is the customer-specific version of the application

I'm looking for suggestions as to the best way to do this in terms of tooling and project configuration.

We're using Ant currently, but would like to avoid getting buried in more ant. Has anyone done this with Maven?

I've seen a lot of posts on how to build a web application that depends on a java application, but nothing on a web application depending on another web app.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Sounds like Maven WAR overlay does what you want.