The way I understand it, Nexus is responsible for storing JAR files that reference other dependency JARs via their pom. And, in turn, the original JAR files can be used as dependencies as well.
However, should we store release artifacts in Nexus? These are files that will never be used as dependencies. They include jar-with-dependencies, WAR files, zip/tar.gz files, etc. What's the right place to store them?
A simple file system HTTP server like http://archive.apache.org/dist/ seems to be the right idea. But Nexus is indeed just a manager on top of that.