Maven is the solution. Anyone with more than a handful of developers should really be running their own maven repository mirror to shield deployments from exte

Maven is the solution. Anyone with more than a handful of developers should really be running their own maven repository mirror to shield deployments from external outages. http://nexus.sonatype.org/ http://nexus.sonatype.org/ is stable and simple to get running. The fact that the libraries get downloaded to ~/.m2 should be irrelevant in production, because your deployments should happen against a deployment-specific role user, and downloads should be super-fast, because they're all from within your colo. (all this being said, I haven't touched java and don't miss it at all since switching to Ruby on Rails to write AdGrok, and that's coming from more than 10 years soaking in java).