Received a main jar file with other jar files that

Question

So i received a java api from a client and the main code is in main.jar. But the instructions he gave me require me to add these other jars (a.jar, b.jar, etc..) into the classpath whenever I want to use main.jar. These other supporting jars are things like Xerces, jakarta-oro, and a few other publicly available libraries. The problem is i don't know what versions they are, so i'm not sure if there would be issues if i just update the pom.xml file in my app to depend on main.jar and also have dependencies to these other jars as well with the latest versions of them.

Whats the best strategy for using main.jar in my maven application? I'm planning on adding main.jar to our internal maven repository, but what should i do about the xerces, jakarta-oro, and other jars when i dont know what versions they are?

Thanks

Answer 1

If you are lucky the file /META-INF/MANIFEST.MF inside a.jar, b.jar etc. contains an entry "Implementation-Version" or some other useful information which tell you what version they are. If not, you can download the latest release(s) from the project web site and check if they have the same file size as your bundled dependencies. You may also come to the idea to bundle the dependencies with the main.jar in one big jar, but this may become funny, when you have the dependencies twice in your classpath at some point in the future...

What about just asking the client what version numbers this dependencies have?

Answer 2

If you don't have any information about these third-party libraries, just add them to src/resources/META-INF/lib and commit to SVN. That's the best way, if we're talking about black box approach.