Does Eclipse do a binary-compatibility-check of jars as they are added to a project?

Question

While I was singing the praises of Maven's dependency management, an Eclipse user told me (an IntelliJ user) they don't need stuff like that because any time they add a jar to a project Eclipse will test it's binary compatibility against other jars in the project.

Is this true? Is this Eclipse itself or a plugin?
Is there similar functionality available in IntelliJ/Netbeans?

Thanks.

Answer 1

I just did the following:

1. Install Eclipse
2. Create new Project
3. Add a library that is missing dependencies.
4. Create a class that does something like System.out.println(com.library.AClass.class);
5. Note that Eclipse does not complain.
6. Run it and get java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError when the class is loaded.

This tells me dependency checks don't (always) happen.

Answer 2

I'm not aware of such a thing in neither Eclipse nor in Maven (you'd need something like the maven-clirr-plugin to do something approaching).