Question

I’m coming from the .NET world where Visual Studio is pretty ubiquitous. VS has a .sln file which pretty exhaustively describes a project, including where to find source files, dependencies, etc.

Now I’m doing some java coding in a team. My problem is this: I’m using intellij and others are using eclipse (while others could be using some other IDE). Is there a standard project description file that can be shared among IDE’s? I obviously don’t want to put my intellij specific files to source control. So what I’m looking for is a standard that pretty much any self-respecting IDE would recognize which you could point it to and it would be able to interpret the project structure, how to find dependencies, the class paths, etc.

Answer 1

Note quite. But you have a “way out”. You can use Maven2. It has a unified pom file which contains all:

• source folders (note: maven imposes a default convention on those, but they are still configurable)
• compiler level
• dependencies
• build steps
• etc..

(Of course that would require to install the maven plugins for both IDEs)

Another option would be to force either of the IDEs and commit their proprietary descriptors.