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ACCU Conference 2010 Proposal (2): Java Dependency Management with Ivy

Type: case study
Duration: 90 min
Speaker name: Paul Grenyer

Speaker Biography
Paul has been programming in one form or another for over 20 years. After several years using C++ and a brief period using C#, Paul is now happy somewhere he hoped he'd never be, programming in Java.

After time in industries such as marking machinery, direct mail, mobile phones, investment banking and Internet TV, Paul is currently working for an exciting new company based in Norwich where he heads up an ever growing team of senior and highly skilled people.

He has been an ACCU member since 2001, a regular publications contributor, including the now well established Desert Island Books column, creator of the mentored developers and a committee member for most of that time. When he's not programming and family life allows, Paul thoroughly enjoys science fiction, heavy metal and cycling.

Description
One of the biggest advantages of Java is the vast number of third party libraries available. As the size and number of third party libraries used grows your application's disk footprint also grows. The ideal place to put dependencies is in a source control system as part of your project. This means that when you or your continuous integration server check out the project for the first time all the dependencies are just there.

Although, storing the dependencies for a single project in a source control system isn't too bad, if you have more than one project using the same or similar sets of dependencies the amount of space taken up in the source control system starts to get a bit ridiculous. And then when a new version of a library comes out and you upgrade, even more space is wasted as the differences between binary jars cannot be detected, so the entire JAR must be replaced.

In this session I will demonstrate how easy it is to integrate Ivy with Ant and Eclipse and use a couple of XML files to manage dependencies without the need to check large numbers of JARs into source control. You will also see how to setup a local repository for any proprietary libraries or versions of libraries not in the publicly available repositories.

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