I am writing an application that integrates Geoserver with a custom component, intended to be hosted on a single servlet engine. Both are Maven based projects, and I would like to stay in Maven land to package it all into a nice distributable. The general idea I have is to add another module to my application that packages the application itself, Geoserver and all dependencies into one nice archive.
I am aware of the maven-assembly-plugin and its capability of storing all dependencies in a target folder, but I am not sure what would be the best way to create a package that it easy to deploy. Googling for any examples has not been successful.
Extra bonus points if the module can be started via mvn jetty:run.
Have you considered packaging them into an EAR project. It will bundle a set of WARs (and jars), and allows you to specify or generate a deployment descriptor.