How to share jar within multiple portlets?

Question

I'm using several jars in my portlets, for instance c3p0. Now I want to avoid to put the jars in every of my portlets lib folders. How can I share one jar file within multiple portlets? And how should I integrate them in the Eclipse IDE? Add an external jar or put them in one dedicated project and include them from there?

Answer 1

One way I can think off is to put all of them in the global path.

For e.g. in Tomcat you could place them at ../liferay-portal-<version>/tomcat-<version>/lib/ext and then when you configure the server-runtime library in eclipse you will have these jars in your build-path.

This link may also help you decide, but it speaks for *-service.jar but I am not sure it would work other jars in any one portlet.

Answer 2

Another solution would be to put them under ../liferay-portal-<version>/tomcat-<version>/webapps/ROOT/WEB-INF/lib

If you place them here you can add the JAR as a dependency for your portlet in the portlets liferay-plugin-package.properties (if you're using Liferay Developer Studio or Liferay IDE then there's a nice GUI for this).

Then on deployment Liferay will copy the required JARS from ROOT/WEB-INF/lib to your portlets WEB-INF/lib

This I believe is the Liferay support mechanism for doing it, and doesn't require a restart because the JARs are copied to the portlets classpath on deployment.