Managing JAR dependencies in a solo development environment

Question

Should I use something like maven for this? Or is it better to find them as they appear? I do not support users other than myself.

Answer 1

I use Maven for solo and team projects. The setup is minimal, and I found it much easier even in solo projects. Sometimes you can spend fair time tracking dependencies for some project you are interested in ... why bother when Maven does this for you and helps keep you from getting conflicts between project dependencies.

Answer 2

As always, it depends. I found maven to work well when you use the popular libraries available in the main maven repositories, so I didn't have to configure myself. In addition, some fancy IDEs like Netbeans make jar management with maven a real pleasure: just start typing the jar name or even a class in this jar, and the libraries are magically found and added as dependencies on your project.

Without an IDE, it is probably much more difficult to add dependencies manually, but I will still be worth it. In the end, what other options do you have. Ant?

Answer 3

Well, without any details, I would simply say: don't you find that Maven is simplifying (it is very likely where the answer to your question is)? If you do not, do not use. If so, then you have your answer. Personally, I use it for all my projects (professional, personal, large teams, small teams, even teams from one).