How should I structure my project to share classes between an Android client application and a JSP server application?

I'm building an Android application (as an Eclipse project) that needs to access a web service. We will be sending the data from the se开发者_如何学编程rvice as JSON serialized classes, so we want to share some of the classes between the Android application and the server application. We are currently thinking that the way we need to do this is to structure our Git repository with 3 folders. One for the client, one for the server, and one for the shared library.

But at that point we couldn't figure out how to create the shared code. It looks like we can put all the .java files into a folder and then create a relative link to that folder from the other projects, but is that a good way to go about this?

The other possibility we found was to create another project in Eclipse and then include the library project in the client project. However we ran into a problem here. How can we make the library usable by both the server and Android? If I create a new Java project in Eclipse, I must select a JRE to build for, but Dalvik isn't an option, and even if it was how could I use the library with a desktop VM if the library was compiled for Dalvik?

I would use 3 projects:

• server
• shared
• client (android)

and include shared as a project dependency in both server and client. If you use ant you'd drop the shared.jar in both server/lib and client/lib every time it's changed, and if you use maven it's a dependency (possibly with Ant + Ivy it's also a dependency). Consider Nexus as a repository location in that case.

You don't actually need to create a separate Eclipse project for the shared classes. You can just create a 'common source folder' outside of the other two projects' disk hierarchy. For both the server and client projects :in the Properties/Java Build Path/Source add a 'Link source' to the new folder. (Perhaps this is what you meant by 'relative link'). It's easy to add this common source folder to an Ant build file.

You could add the path to the classes/JARs to the server's runtime classpath.

Since it's unclear which one you're using, here's just a generic answer based on Apache Tomcat.

• Open /conf/catalina.properties file.

• Edit shared.loader entry to include the path to the package root of those classes or JAR file(s).

  E.g.

  shared.loader = /path/to/classes
  

  or

  shared.loader = /path/to/specific.jar
  

  or

  shared.loader = /path/to/*.jar
  

  You can even specify multiple paths separated by a comma.