Extending Java Web Applications with plugins

Question

I have this web application that has grown to an unmanageable mess.

I want to split it into a common \"framework\" part (that still includes web stuff like pages and im

Answer 1

Have you looked at using maven to separate out your projects and then have it resolve the dependencies between the WARs and JARs? You'll end up with duplication of libraries between WARs, but only where it's necessary (and this shouldn't be a problem unless you get into some funky classloader fun).

Tomcat also allows you to configure cross context applications if you need to get from one WAR to another in a relatively transparent way...

If you want to keep things under the same single web app (say ROOT) you could create a proxy webapp that forwards through to the relevant other webapp behind the scenes for the user to make it relatively transparent?