Reduce the EAR file size by trimming the WEB-INF\LIB folder jars

In my previous blog I said of removing the jar files basically from the APP-INF\lib.

But most of us want to remove the JAR files from the WEB-INF\LIB folder also just in case to truncate the EAR to the maximum possible extent.

How many of us will and have hindered this exception as "the path of the URI is wrong or no reference to the TLD" etc., etc.,

When you google it the best way is to add up the jar files like struts.jar into the WEB-INF\LIB and deploy the app and you are safe.

doing this actually increase the size of the ear and it does not really solve our problem at hand.

did not help a lot and I understood that many people have this problem at hand and there was no definitive answer.

here is a way to get rid of this also. Again this I tried in weblogic and there should be a way to accomplish this with other application servers too.

Here are the steps to perform this reduction.

Copy all the necessary TLD of the COTS jar files into a location in your workspace say WEB-INF\tld
Change the web.xml to have the references to the TLD files

http://java.sun.com/jsp/jstl/core
/WEB-INF/tld/c.tld

By default you can remove these jar files from the WEB-INF\LIB folder.
Ensure that you have deployed these JAR files as LIBRARY into the application server
Generate the EAR file and you should see happy smiles on the deployer.