Managing Java web apps using CMS

At our shop we are using J2EE to build Web apps. For example, we have 
signup forms for some of our various programs implemented as servlet/JSP 
applications. We will soon purchase a CMS. I am wondering how those two 
things are going to go together. A lot of you probably know this already, 
but with a J2EE application, what you do is package the whole application 
into a ".war" file (.war : "Web archive") and place that into the annointed 
directory of your application server (we're using JRun). Every part of the 
app is inside this .war file — the program's servlets and other supporting 
code in binary form (or the rough Java equivalent), and the JSP files which 
are HTML pages with embedded Java code and tags. Page headers and footers, 
nav bars, main content is all tied up inside the .war file.

This mode of operation does not seem like it would work in a CMS 
environment. From what I understand, a CMS stores all these page elements 
in a database and assembles them either at run time or in advance. But you 
can't break a .war file apart and store the pieces in a database and still 
have a working application.

I asked this question of a representative from Percussion about a year ago 
and he said that we would keep our Web apps over here and our static pages 
over there in the CMS and manage them separately. (They may have a better 
answer now. That was a while back.) However, the Web apps are supposed to 
share the appearance of the other pages on the site. So if we use the CMS 
to change the page headers we'll have to go in to all our Web apps 
individually and update the page headers. And if we change the navigation 
structure that's going to be an even bigger hassle.

There are many Web apps and they are scattered throughout the site. So what 
we really need is to manage their page elements at the same time that we 
manage the elements of our HTML pages.

Any insight or information about this issue would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Ethan

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