Hi

I've been learning a great deal lately about best practices in design and implementation of business requirements and code (thanks Rod, but I'm struggling to do the same at the 'sysadmin' level.

Using Spring, I havea couple of client applications under development, which may (or may not) be interdependent, but both (and others) will rely on one foundation: the core stuff - authentication, authorization, menus, user/organization admin/structures. Having created this core stuff as a seperate application, I am a looking for advice as to how best to keep it from being 'consumed' by each application built atop it. i.e. I'd like to keep the context, servlet and hibernate definition files independently maintained (as well as the code base).

As I'm fairly new to Spring/JSP/Tomcat, I'm struggling to think of any solution except a fairly complex Ant build file to 'merge' the required files from the seperate applications into one war file for deployment - which is not really what I was trying to achieve. (Although I can't release the client apps, I would like to release the core stuff).

My apologies if this is not all entirely 'on topic' for Spring, but any guidance would be appreciated.

Many thanks

Philip