Looking for a "Super Project" feature

Question

First, you will have to excuse me if this is the wrong forum for this. I just couldn't find any specific forum for Java project-build/management.
Now, I'm looking for some sort of a feature/ability/plug-in, especially for Eclipse, which resembles this:
Super projects - a combination of several projects under the same organizational structure. It doesn't refer to a new technology, nor a new feature of Java. It only refer to a way of organizing your projects.
A reason to have such thing, in case you were wondering, is to standardize the use of certain projects, all closely-related (technically and logically) to a certain system, but aren't related enough to exist in the same project.
For an example, let's say we have a certain system. It has a main project, which is the core of the system. Then, we have another project, which allows monitoring our system. It isn't a project that could be under the core-project, as it has too many differences (both technical and logical), but it uses lots of the same libraries, abilities and external resources the core-project uses as well (for example, a jar which allows a more comfortable use of JDBC, or just a configuration file), and of course still logically related to the core-project.
Therefore, those two projects, the core and the monitor, should be under the same super project - sharing libraries, abilities and external resources.
So how should it look like? Well, here are several ideas:
- First of all, a certain way to view those projects as being under the same super-project.
- An option (and warning-display if possible) of sharing jars. Instead of linking a certain jar to each project separately, a jar will be defined as shared, and could be shared by some or all of the projects in the super-project.
- Same thing with any other file (such as resource files).
- A meta-data file, containing information of which projects are in the super-project, what jars (or any other file) are being used, and what's the version of each of those jars.
- Comfortable save/load of those projects together, and their shared files (nothing more then a super directory with "Projects" directory for the projects in the super project, and a "Shared" directory for all the shared jars and other files).
I'll repeat myself - I'm not talking about a new technology, but just a feature, or a plug-in.
So, are you familiar of anything resembling that? or something at least in production stage?

Answer 1

EyalR wrote:
Well, I didn't figured how the idea of a super-project, or several combined projects works with Maven. I guess it's because this tool is filled with many options, and there's no good documentation that I've found which simply explains what's every thing is (or maybe I'm just dumb).Having just recently taken the dive into real development with Maven recently (I've been dabbling before), I too have the feeling that the documentation (especially for the rough overview and getting-into-it) is somehow lacking, in many areas. The documentation is much better suited for finding specific information when you already know what exactly you want it Maven to do.
That being said: I strongly suggest you invest the time to get over that first hurdle, because in my opinion it's definitely worth it.
Anyway, it seems I'm looking for something more simple and straightforward.Out of curiosity: If it should be simple and straightforward, what artifacts would you expect such a product/technology to produce? What would you use it for?
Maven uses that big pile of metadata about your project for building your project from source, managing your dependencies, deploying your artifacts to a defined repository, running your tests and many other things as well.
Having something "simple and straightforward" would almost seem like a waste of effort, because with that kind of meta-data you can do much bigger things.
Edit: I just remembered [Apache Ivy|http://ant.apache.org/ivy/]: it's a dependency-management task for ant. This means that it handles the same task of a (very small) subset of Maven, but it a lot simpler to use (if you already know and use ant). It doesn't do any sub-projects or anything like that, but might be a more gentle introduction into the world of post-ant build/project/configuration management.