So my last blog entry started off talking about POJO persistence and ended talking about automatic dependency resolution. So apart from the rambling monologue, I think the dependency resolution is an important point. I've long envied maven users' ability to declare the dependencies and let maven deal with find the required libraries. I envied them to the point of considering writing my own but then I found a couple of options. There's Ivy and ant-dependenices. When I tried Ivy (v. 0.6), i had issues getting it running so I tried ant-dependencies (v 0.4).

Ivy 0.7 has since been released so I need to take another look at it. Ivy seems to be a bit more mature so I'd like to stick with that. Either way, something like this should be a standard part of ant at least. I'm not about making it part of the jdk, though. Although it might help keep things in sync between ant and maven. But that could probably still be better handled as a third party library. So that's what I'd like to see: a standardized library that works as an ant or maven task to handle third party dependencies. Then we can have one repository to maintain and submit to. I'm fine if someone just takes that code out of the maven tree and builds a separate project. But something like this needs to be more widely available.