In software projects we make use of various types of software libraries. These libraries can be third party, application server related or project specific. Governance of Library management in such projects is very important. I have compiled a small list of do's and don'ts of software library management.
1. Avoid duplicates jar files
2. Avoid multiple version of same jar files
3. Remove unwanted jars
4. Use latest stable versions of library files
5. Use Server default Library NOT Application library for common shared libraries
6. Form a Change management to govern the library management and its usage.
In one of the projects am going through 250 + jar files to know which files to keep, update or delete. It's difficult as I do not know which jar files are used by which deployed application. After some googl-ing I came across a very handy utility named Jaranalyzer which helps to understand jar dependency. The tool needs to be fed with the folder that contains all the jar files and the output is either an XML or a dot file. The dot file can be passed through an open source graph visualization software to get a graphic representation of the dependency.
URLs to refer -
http://code.google.com/p/jaranalyzer/
http://www.kirkk.com/main/Main/JarAnalyzer#xml
http://www.graphviz.org/
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