Maven dependency graph in NetBeans

Earlier today, we noticed one the maven war files was being bundled with the geronimo-spec-javamail.jar. Unfortunately, the other projects use the standard java mail.jar. The presence of 2 seperate mail jars under the same tomcat instance has been causing us mime-type conflicts.

Hot-deploying worked though so we figured it was something to do with bundled jars.

In NetBeans, the geronimo jar appeared greyed out in the list of libraries, indicating a transitive dependency. How to work out which jar is at the root of this dependency?

1. Tools -> Plugins -> Install “Maven Dependency Graphs”
2. Return to project
3. Right-click the Libraries node and select “Show Library Dependency Graph”
4. Here, just type in the jar you want to trace and it reduces the graph to just a single tree

The plugin is still in beta, but it saved me lots of time so I would recommend it.

Update:

Unfortunately, this plugin was available in 6.5Beta but not in 6.5RC1. Hopefully it’ll make a comeback soon.