Deploy WAR or “fat” JAR?

Question

I\'m noticing a lot of projects (DropWizard, Grails, etc.) starting to embrace the notion of a \"fat\" JAR (using an embedded web server like Jetty or Tomcat) vs. the traditiona

Answer 1

Distributing an application with an embedded webserver allows for standalone setup and running it by just calling java -jar application.jar.

However, there may be users who want to be in control of which web server is used or who want to deploy multiple applications into a single webserver (e.g. in order to prevent port clashes especially with ports 80 and 8080). In that case a "fat" jar might cause problems or at least some unneeded code and thus a larger memory footprint.

IMHO the best approach for those two cases would be to provide two artifacts: a "fat" jar for (easier) standalone setup and an application-only war/ear for those who want to deploy the application in their own container.