This plug-in provides support for creating, installing and running an executable JAR for Maven 1.0. It will create a single big JAR including all dependencies, so no additional entry is necessary for the classpath.
The plug-in is used on Windows 2000, Gentoo and SUSE Linux 8.1 therefore it should work on all major platforms.
Currently there is the UBERJAR plugin available doing a similiar job but due to performance problems in the class loader I would not recommended it for larger projects.
Just in case you have multiple project distributables (e.g. one executable JAR and a WAR file in my case) it might be useful to clean the temporary files in between those targets.