Eclipse Automatically Download / Update JAR files

Question

I just created a Web App project from a repository through Eclipse's SVN support. What I would be doing is have an ANT build going and then finally deploy through Tomcat.

I am using Eclipse IDE for Java EE developers on an Ubuntu system.

There are a number of jar files needed to support my project - like Struts, Hibernate, etc. etc.

Do I need to

manually download each of them

and put them in the lib folder?

OR

Does Eclipse have a solution to automatically UPDATE these from the internet? Any plugins to automatically take care of this?

Answer 1

You should consider using Maven for your project. It's VERY well supported in Eclipse, and handles all dependencies (as well as other things, such as releases).

The problem is there's a bit of a learning curve, but if you intend your project to get to a considerable size, I'd say it's very important.

Maven has support for ant builds and most libraries are in the central Maven repository. You just say your project has a dependency on the external project and it will automatically download the dependencies.

http://maven.apache.org/