I have a war file which is about 500-700mb in size and the deployment takes extremely long (1-1.5hr) in production environment.
Most of the jar files are 3rd party libraries which will be rarely changed unless there is an upgrade.
I am considering to move the 3rd party libraries to the classpath of the server to reduce the size of the war file and to cut short the deployment time.
Is this a good approach?
I am using Websphere and maven as a build tool. If I am able to move these 3rd part libraries from my webapp to my server classpath, I will be able to change the dependency scope from compile to provided.
The server is only used for my system and I am not afraid of any classpath conflicts.