Hi guys, thanks for your suggestions, I'll get a look at Maven and Ivy soon but I'm not sure they do what I want. What I was looking for is a pratical way to automatically download (from a package repository like CPAN, Pear or PyPI but for Java) and install 3rd party Java packages, with all dependencies included.
As an example, if I want to use delicious Java API actually I have to:
1. find this package over the internet, download and install it inside a directory listed in CLASSPATH. So far so good.
2. find the package that provides HttpClient type required by delicious API (commons-httpclient-3.1.jar contains that but I had to search for it) and install it. Hmmm... ok :-(
3. download, install dependencies for HttpClient (commons-codec, commons-logging,
junit) and hope that these packages have not other requirements in terms of other packages they need :-)
4. finally use delicious API to write client classes.
Sorry, probably I didn't explain it clearly in my original post. The question was if there is a way to automate steps 1, 2 and 3 without having to setup and configure a fully featured build system (or even a "simple" standalone ivy).
Thanks!