title: How to extend/customize a WAR with another project
body: <p>We have the following scenario with our project:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>A core web application packaged as a
  war file (call it Core project). </li>
  <li>The need to "customize" or "extend" the core app
  per customer (call it Customer project). This mostly includes
  new bean definitions (we're using
  Spring), ie. replacing service
  implementations in the core.war with
  customer-specific implementations.</li>
  <li>We want to develop the Core and Customer projects independently </li>
  <li>When the Customer project is developed, we need to be able to run/debug it in Eclipse (on Tomcat) with the Core project as a dependency</li>
  <li>When the Customer project is built, the resulting war file "includes" the core and customer projects. So this .war is the customer-specific version of the application</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>I'm looking for suggestions as to the best way to do this in terms of tooling and project configuration.</p>
  
  <p>We're using Ant currently, but would like to avoid getting buried in more ant. Has anyone done this with Maven?</p>
  
  <p>I've seen a lot of posts on how to build a web application that depends on a java application, but nothing on a web application depending on another web app.</p>
  
  <p>Thanks!</p>