Question

I’m wondering if there is some recommended reading, best practice or opinion on how to organize larger Java projects.

I made the observations that there are folks who split up everything into projects (i.e. modules) and create many many projects that share a web of dependencies. This has the advantage that compilation is often super fast, but when the project gets large nobody knows anymore what depends on what and why. Not talking about dependent libraries, version conflicts & co.

The alternative is to have just a couple of projects such as frontend, backend, … . The namespacing does the job.

Any opinion, further reading anyone could recommend?

Answer 1

A very large project will need to have some way of tracking all of the libraries and other dependencies that it uses. The defacto standard for doing this is Maven. It’s definitely the best way to start keeping track of what is going into your application.

Then you can decide how to split your application up. Basically, what you’re trying to do here is to split up your application up into complete functional pieces. For instance, if you had a website that had a contact form, a photo gallery, a shopping cart, and a forum, you would split the project up into pieces that contained each of those different modules.