If you aren't using IDEA, you can skip this document.

One of the hardest things with distributed projects and IDEs is to manage the location of libraries. If the location of a jar library is hardcoded in a project file, problems arise when the project file is shared between developers. Even if project developers could agree on a standard location for the files, operating system path differences make it impossible. Relative paths have been used in the past for this, but it requires library duplication across project trees.

IntelliJ has introduced the concept of module, project and global libraries. They don't really explain why you would want to use one as opposed to another, but the project and global libraries allow the developer to assign libraries in groups with a group name. This name forms something of a symbolic link, allowing developers to have their own location for the libraries, so long as the name is the same on all machines. We chose to use the global library list instead of the project library list because we would create conflicts if we checked in a project file with the hardcoded pathnames of the libary files.

Now that we have decided to use global libraries, we simply have to decide on a name for the groups. With some trial and error, we have come up with the following groups for libraries, with explanations for the not so obvious ones:

• jboss - jboss-j2ee, javax.servlet.jar, jbosssx.jar, jboss-common-client.jar
• Test - Cactus, JUnit, StrutsTestCase, MockEJB
• Drools
• Plexus
• Netbeans MDR - These are libraries that are used by the generators
• AndroMDA
• Hibernate
• Struts
• Commons - Logging, Log4j (might belong somewhere else), Collections, BeanUtils
• mx4j
• Pico
• Generama
• Ant
• Werkflow
• dom4j
• Velocity
• XDoclet2
• Jelly
• XStream
• Apache Regexp
• Tomcat - $TOMCAT/server/lib/catalina.jar
• Digester - Blech... when can this go away???

Attached to this document is library configuration file that goes in $HOME/.IntelliJIdea/config/options. Since you may already have some global libraries, the trick is going to be to hand-merge the entities from the document, either updating the location of the jars directly or using the IDEA project configuration.