Originally posted by Cristian Negresco:
I mainly need to have a virtual project which creates a jar out of file system resources. The project should realize when one of the resources has changed and rebuild the output jar. The output jar is to be put in /WebContent of a war.
Zipcreator was replaced by the concept of project utility jars (which is probably why you can't find it.) You create a java project with your code. Then you add it as a project utility project for your EAR. It automatically gets jar'd up into a jar in the EAR that any projects in the EAR can reference. I haven't tried it with a war though. To try that out, you would go to the
J2EE perspective. In any case, it is usually ok to store the jar in the EAR directory or subdirectory.
I could not access resources outside the directory where the Java project was created.
Why not? It is just Java code which inherits the environment of its caller. If you call it from a
servlet, the Java code has access to the web project's resources.
I would also like the jars to be signed, but that's already a different story
Consider
Ant. In fact, this may solve all your problems
. You can configure an Ant script to run every time you modify a project. Just point to it as an "external tool builder" on the project properties.