Daniel Nordhoff-Vergien:
David H Nebinger:
Defining a service within an EXT plugin has been deprecated for awhile and should be avoided.
Which is the way to deploy a service used by several plugins then?
One portlet should be the 'service provider'. This portlet has the service.xml file, and when built should generate the corresponding service jar.
Other portlets are 'service consumers'. Their liferay-plugin-package.properties file should list the service provider portlet as a required deployment context. In the Liferay IDE, it will automagically copy the service jar from the service provider portlet to the service consumer portlets whenever the service is rebuilt. Honestly I'm not sure if the Liferay maven archetypes are 'smart enough' to do the same thing or whether you need to pull the jar in manually yourself.
Coincidentally, one portlet project can actually host multiple individual portlets (define multiple portlets in portlet.xml and liferay-portlet.xml). This introduces coupling into the portlet plugin project (may be undesirable) but would be a path to resolve multiple portlets accessing the same service jar.
