Guess what.. I'm working on the same thing only starting from the fetching the jar side. Then storing it in a local repository, then using it for builds, then using it for runtime. I'm hoping to steal some code from JBoss who already have the solution to parts of this problem.

Anyway, jardeps can already do the dependency analysis, jar downloading, and classpath generation. It doesn't do any classloader games yet, although that would be a logical thing to do. The next thing on my list was to try and get the dependency information from tiny little XML descriptors like we've been discussing on repository@apache.org. I haven't done much because I've been waiting to see what happened on repository@ and with the Maven top level project.

Hey Andy, why don't we find a way to do this together?