Packaging for distribution

[dkav...@gmail.com]

I've been giving some thought to various ways of packaging lifeguard
for distribution. Here are some runtime scenarios I'd want to plan
for;
- service instance, needs jars
- standalone lifeguard manager, a war file? how many people would
really use it this way?
- embedded lifeguard manager, needs jars, other support files to add
into another app.

I'm faced with the third scenario right now. I want an easy way to
create a lifeguard distribution that can be merged into my own
application. I need this to make upgrades to newer releases of
lifeguard fairly painless. For normal projects I use, I just grab the
latest jar file and drop it into the lib dir. With lifeguard now
including a web gui, there are more files that go along with a
distribution besides classes. What I'm thinking about is a zip file
that includes a lifeguard.jar plus a directory structure to include
webapp/.. and maybe scripts.

I know there are a few people using lifeguard already. What scenario
best fits your situation? Is there another deployment scenario I
haven't considered?

Thanks,
David