Hi, thanks very much for a response. I will try explain this better. In a traditional J2EE application like many I have worked on in the past the way I would normally develop them in a EJB sense is: Firstly I would develop my DAO components - EJB Entity beans for example. I would then develop my business layer components - EJB Session beans for example. I would then develop a web application which using JNDI would be able to look up the beans and use them. If I made a change to just one of the DAO components all I would need to do is drop it into the server's (JBoss) deploy directory and the container would load the bean and make it available to my business layer, and indeed any other business layer components which would use it.
Trying to go for more lightweight development, I am making a transition away from EJBs (more so Entity beans) as the development and maintainability of them is too high. At the moment I am using a lot of lightweight Hibernate DAOs, but I am building and deploying my entire source tree as one task. I would like to break these various parts back down into components which I can freely change about required. So for example I would like to have my Hibernate DAO implementations as components which implement a specific interface, likewise I may have plain JDBC DAO implementations. The way I see this is as follows (broken into a very simple example): I have two web applications: "WebApp1" and completely separate "WebApp2", and I want both of them to be able to use the same component. The two web apps are contained within their own war/ear etc. How do I start implementing a shared component which both of the web applications can use? I hope that makes a little more sense. Thanks Chris