Our web application has static content packaged as part of WAR. We have been planning to move it out of the project and host it directly on Apache to achieve the following objectives.

• It's getting too big and bloating the EAR size resulting in slower deployment across nodes. Faster deployment times.
• Take the load of Application Server
• Host the static content on a sub domain allowing some browsers (IE) to load resources simultaneously
• Give us an option to use further caching such as Apache mod_cache apart from the cache headers we send out to browsers.

We use yuicompressor-maven-plugin to aggregate and minimize JS file.

My question is how do package and manage this static content out side of the web application?

My current options are.

• New maven war project. Still use the same plugin for aggregation and compression.
• Just a plain directory in SVN and use YUI/Google compressor directly.

Or is there a better technology out there to manage static content as a project?