Maven dependencies not copied to WEB-INF/lib

[eliasbalasis]

Continuing from gwtproject/gwt#10056

Running DevMode on a GWT module that carries modules with similar names does not copy all JARs to WEB-INF/lib

for example: spring-webmvc.jar is copied but spring-web.jar is not

Checkout and import https://bitbucket.org/upperlimit-public/gwt-devmode-server/src/main into an Eclipse Workspace.

I am using Eclipse 2025-03 but any relatively recent version should reproduce the problem.

Run DevMode on module GWT-DevMode-server.POC.javax.web with program argument -server net.upperlimit.tools.GWT.DevMode.server.impl.Cargo.embedded.Tomcat9.javax.DevModeServerLauncher after enabling profile named IMPL_CARGO_EMBEDDED_TOMCAT9

Under target/gwt-maven-plugin/WEB-INF/lib you will only see spring-webmvc.jar present but not spring-web.jar

This is important because the components in the missing JAR are loaded by the parent DevMode classloader instead of the webapp classloader, leading to a chain of runtime problems which are impossible to resolve.

[eliasbalasis]

Further study reveals that it is not the name itself but the JAR content.

I confirmed this by creating a new module with identical content as spring-web but different name and it was not copied to WEB-INF/lib

[eliasbalasis]

Besides fixing the generation of the WAR content, it would perhaps help if "GWT plugin" could have an option to skip copying of the WAR files and instead generate only hte GWT code, leaving generation of the base WAR content to the system, Maven in my case.

[eliasbalasis]

I have studied the source code and I figured out that the setting titled "Launch and deploy from this directory" is controlling the copy of the web content.
On a Maven project this is deactivated meaning web content is always copied.
The starting point reference can be found at com.google.gdt.eclipse.core.properties.ui.WebappProjectPropertyPage#isWarSrcDirOutputButton

Activating this setting skips copying of the web content and it can be considered a temporary workaround.

However, it would be helpful if there was a way to make it optional for Maven projects, perhaps when building the GWT settings from pom.xml or simply fix the copy process.

I hope this helps.