WebJars Officially Launched!

2012-10-31 (Last Modified: 2012-10-31)

Back in April I started an experiment called “WebJars” to see if it would be useful to package web libraries (JavaScript, CSS, etc) as Jar files. WebJars allow you to declaratively set client-side application dependencies just like we do for the server-side. A nice side effect of this is transitive dependencies. For instance, if you specify Bootstrap 2.2.1 as a dependency, then you automatically also get jQuery 1.8.2 as well. WebJars also make it easy to know what versions of web libraries are being used since not all web libraries use versions in their naming conventions.

Today WebJars are moving from an experiment to something real! I’ve launched the new webjars.org site and released all of the WebJars to Maven Central. The new site has a list of all the WebJars and documentation on how to use WebJars in Play 2, Servlet 3, Dropwizard, and Spring MVC apps.

I hope that WebJars help you build modern web applications! Let me know what you think of WebJars. Thanks!