We're actually transitioning from Nexus to S3 as our internal Maven repository. It alleviates disk space concerns, better uptime, better throughput, etc. We ac

We're actually transitioning from Nexus to S3 as our internal Maven repository. It alleviates disk space concerns, better uptime, better throughput, etc. We actually still produce executable JARs with this approach. 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 and no runtime or ClassLoader funny business.