We still use java -jar with this setup. We configure the maven-jar-plugin to construct the classpath at build time and add it as a Class-Path entry to the manif

We still use java -jar with this setup. We configure the maven-jar-plugin to construct the classpath at build time and add it as a Class-Path entry to the manifest. This is a special manifest entry and on startup the JVM automatically adds these files to the classpath, so our thin JARs are runnable with java -jar assuming the dependencies are dropped in the right place. The slimfast-plugin reads the configuration of the maven-jar-plugin to make sure it's generating the right paths for the dependencies. We end up with an executable JAR with no runtime or ClassLoader funny business. Also, we use Singularity as our Mesos scheduler and it handles S3 artifacts out of the box. Previously we gave it a single S3 URL for the fat JAR, but now we just give it a list of artifacts (the app plus its dependencies) and it handles everything for us so it's not much more complexity and ended up being really easy to integrate into our deploy process.