Recently I had the need to bundle an application to run on the command line. Before, I had created a war file with embeddd Jetty, so that all the normal dependencies could just be internally dropped in WEB-INF/lib. There's a new way to go about this type of application with Spring Boot.
Whether you use the Spring framework, or even Spring Boot or not, the Spring Boot build file and package rewrite they do to support, effectively, jars-in-jars classloading is extremely usefl.
Here's all you need. Your main class doesn't have to do anything special, you package a jar with the application plugin as normal, and that's that.
Enjoy!