More Servlets and JavaServer Pages™

4.4. Recording Dependencies on Server Libraries

With servlet and JSP engines (or “containers”) supporting the servlet 2.2 and JSP 1.1 API, there is no portable way to designate that a Web app depends on some shared library that is not part of the servlet or JSP API itself. You have to either copy the library’s JAR file into the WEB-INF/lib directory of each and every Web application, or you have to make server-specific changes that lack mechanisms for verification.

With servlet version 2.3 (JSP version 1.2), you can use the META-INF/MANI-FEST.MF file to express dependencies on shared libraries. Compliant containers are required to detect when these dependencies are unfulfilled and provide a warning. Note that although support for these dependencies ...