I think it's completely legitimate that App B would "depend" on App A.
I can easily see App B having some servlet Init method, or other lifecycle events that rely on the webservices from App A already being started.
If the application module startup sequence is deterministic (and controllabe by the user), then this process isn't fragile at all. It's a deployment dependency, sure, but so is requiring, say, a database to be up and running before deployment.
If the startup sequence is NOT deterministic, or not changeable by the user, then that's a different issue.
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