Best practices for managing jar files

Question

just wondering what anyone's thoughts are on managing jar files. I have read that instead of adding the jar files to your CLASSPATH environment variable, you can just extend the jdk. This is accomplished by inserting the jar files into the C:\jdk1.3.1_01\jre\lib\ext directory. I suspect that if the latter option is truly feasible, it would be preferred to adding entries to the CLASSPATH variable for every jar file you want to use. You could end up with hundreds of entries into the CLASSPATH variable if you have that many jar files in use.
Any thoughts, comments, or links to where I can find any info on this?...
thanks for any information.....

Answer 1

In my company, we use scripts (in UNIX system) to handle this problem. The following scripts can iterate jar files in a given directory:
for i in ${YOUR_LIB_DIR}/*.jar
do
YOUR_CLASSPATH=${YOUR_CLASSPATH}:$i
done
With this simple script, you can use any directory in the same way as the ext\ direcotry (just copy the jar file in it), and you still have the flexibility of maintaining jar files in different directories, say a number of projects.
but i don't know whether .bat/.cmd scripts for windows have the same function.