I am currently working in a Java project, and we use maven to build the final jar. There are two ways to build the jars as we all know, i.e. one single jar with-dependencies, and a jar without dependencies. In the latter case, we need to add dependent jars to the classpath as well.
In principle both can work, personally I prefer one jar with dependencies, but in the project team members decided to use separate jar without dependencies. So hereby I would like to know which choice is better?
This question has no answer, since it depends on what you need to do.
If you're writing an utility package or component, that could be a dependency of another project, then there's no point in having all the dependencies inside it - it's better to leave dependency resolution to a dependency manager, like Maven.
If you, instead, are writing a full application packaged as a jar, I mean something with a MainClass that can be executed with java -jar myjar, then having the dependencies together will make distribution easier.
Consider that, for instance, if you're writing a webapp, that'll be packaged as a WAR, it normally comes with dependencies.
