What's the best way to share JARs across multiple projects?

Question

When you have multiple projects that all use the same set of JAR libraries, it\'s tedious to include the same JARs over and over again with each project. If I\'m working on

Answer 1

We have decided on a more tedious method but which allows us to have everything inhouse, but will probably only work well for a small set of developers.

Each set of jar files is set up as a Eclipse project named appropriately after the jar set, added to the build path, source jars and javadoc jars correctly set on each jar in the build path, and each project then includes those library projects needed for that project. The resulting multi-project workspace is then exported as a ProjectSet.psf file which can then be read in in a raw Eclipse bringing in the whole workspace again. We then have all the above projects in CVS including the jar files.

This has worked very wellf or us.

If you are in a larger organization the dependency handling in Maven may work well for you. You should definitively have a local cache of artifacts so the whole world doesn't stop if your internet connection is lost.

Also note that the new Eclipse 3.5 coming out this sommer, will have a "Create Runnable Jar" which can output the needed jars next to the generated runnable jar and set up the Class-PAth line in the Manifest correctly. I expect that to be a big time saver - check it out.