I have a jar with all my project classes. Some of the classes need
to access external jars, for example the XmlWriter.jar by Megginson.
If I include that jar within my jar and run the jar, it doesn't see
the classes within the XmlWriter jar. I know a solution is to
extract the classes and put them into my own jar. That works fine.

But is there a way of including the jar itself. I read somewhere
else that the jar should not be inside the application jar as it
can't read it there, so I have tried putting it outside, alongside
the application jar but I still can't get it to work.

So how exactly should this work?