[mceachen]

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/ 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).

[quicksilver03]

I disagree: you should put in version control each library that your project depends on. I don't see what Maven adds beyond introducing an artificial dependency on a tool outside of your control.