title: Alternative to maven assembly:single for packaging
body: <p>What are the alternatives for packaging a standalone java application apart from creating a big fat assembly, which is horrible in some scenarios as</p>
  
  <p>1) Conflicting files (with same names eg. reference.xml) in resource path of two or more jars get overriden by the lucky one. </p>
  
  <p>2) Replacing a single jar is not possible without extracting and merging and compressing again.</p>
  
  <p>Is there a solution more on the lines of an exploded war file, with all the libs in a lib folder and main class file's jar containing manifest entries.
  I am sure i had done that in ant and could surely be done in maven too. </p>