I have a war file which is about 500-700mb in size and the deployment takes extremely long (1-1.5hr) in production environment.
Most of the jar files are 3rd party libraries which will be rarely changed unless there is an upgrade.
I am considering to move the 3rd party libraries to the classpath of the server to reduce the size of the war file and to cut short the deployment time.
Is this a good approach?
I am using Websphere and maven as a build tool. If I am able to move these 3rd part libraries from my webapp to my server classpath, I will be able to change the dependency scope from compile to provided.
The server is only used for my system and I am not afraid of any classpath conflicts.
Yes that is a good approach, 3rd party libraries can be configured as shared libraries. This gives you the benefit of improved deployment times for your application and also allows multiple applications to share the same libraries.
See WebSphere doc: Creating shared libraries