How I do (Java) development on Mac OS X

I just want to share how I set up to do development on my Mac OS X machine, specifically, in my case, Java development, especially my use of a local Homebrew root.

All the project I hack on live under ~/dev, in there I create a directory for the project (ex. cool-java-library), which represents the workspace for the project (and, before I switched to IntelliJ IDEA, was also the workspace within Eclipse).

Inside the workspace I typically have:

• a directory which is either a mercurial (hg) or git repository of the project (source code, configuration, committed documentation), or a local checkout from Subversion (but even in this case it’s probably a mercurial clone of the Subversion repository, using hgsubversion).
• any additional repositories/clones/checkouts, such as a local Subversion checkout when using a hgsubversion clone (for some things that can’t be done with hgsubversion, or to check Subversion-specific commits, or other checks)
• any temporary files, such as diffs, patches, SQL dumps, floating documentation files
• a local Homebrew root (see below)

One of the peculiarities of my setup is the Homebrew root. Homebrew allows you to make a local installation of itself, and any package (or formula as they call it) installed with the workspace-local ‘brew’ will be installed in the workspace-local root, as well as any dependencies it has. This allows me to install & setup project-specific dependencies with Homebrew (instead of having to fiddle with installing them directly from the original provider, e.g. Apache, Eclipse, PostgreSQL), without having to impact my system-wide software.

I’m really quite happy with this setup, please let me know what you think 🙂

P.S. If there are any Arch Linux users out there, do you know if it is possible to have something akin to this ‘local Homebrew root’ setup in Arch Linux using pacman?