Framework creating tips for web applications

Hi,

We are developing multiple web applications and will host them as different products.
I am currently in the process of developing a framework which will be used by the developers as the base for developing the web applications. Some functionalities like logging, exception handling, service locator, taglibs, Data AccessManager i intend to put in the framrwork.
we will have a framework.jar which will be used by the web applications.
This will make the life of the developers working on differnet products easy and also ensure smooth maintainability of the different products as they basic framework will be same across all.

are there any sites which can give some general tips for doing this job effectively specially for exception handling, logging and build environment?
one issue i m facing is that the common web resources (eg. tlds) cannot be included in frameework.jar, rather they have to be copied in the WEB-INF folder of the web application. i am copying the web resources at buil time from framework source folder to web application.

any other features except from the ones listed above which can be a part of framework?

i know the question is vague

any suggestions/comments are welcome.

thanks

ps: btw we r using spring on web and business layers and IBatis on data access layer.

one issue i m facing is that the common web resources (eg. tlds) cannot be included in frameework.jar, rather they have to be copied in the WEB-INF folder of the web application. i am copying the web resources at buil time from framework source folder to web application.

We resolve the problem in the same way (ant script that copies one canonical tld file to all webinf dirs). I'd be very interested to hear if anyone has a more elegant way to do this.

Generally speaking, I think it's perfectly acceptable for a file to be copied into a number of directories. What matters is that this process is automated via a script.

(eg. tlds) cannot be included in frameework.jar

TLDs most certainly can be included in a jar file. I do it all the time.

Just be sure that they are placed in the correct location (META-INF) and that the web apps use auto-discovery to find them (e.g. not declared in web.xml).

Moving to Servlet.

Ant and log4j are two tools that you should defineately look at.