So following your Book example it only has two dependencies in the Maven2 POM which are the servlet-api.jar and the xfire-spring.jar. So when you add xfire-spring Maven2 is smart enough to pull down all of its dependenices and put them in WEB-INF/lib. That is exactly what you want for Maven2, HOWEVER it is pulling down TOO MUCH. HttpUnit, Junit, and many other Jars I don't think are needed for execution are included which bloat the size of the WAR. Those jar's in the XFire Spring POM should be listed as <optional>true</optional> which will use them for compilation of Xfire but not when someone references your jar in a POM. I use the org.hibernate POM as an example. They need CP30 and SwarmCache to compile, but when I ask for org.hibernate in my POM, C3PO and SwarmCache do not get downloaded and included because it is marked as optional.