Eclipse provides a great way to manage sets of jar, it is called User Libraries. This way you can organize groups of jar files, and keep a high-level view of your dependencies. Unfortunately, the standard Eclipse plug-in for J2EE, WST, doesn't care at all about User Libraries, in fact, it doesn't even care about projects' exported entries when you declare a project as a J2EE module dependency. WST, for toys projects only? It's one of the areas where Netbeans is far better than Eclipse. Unfortunately, Netbeans is still behind on several key points, one of them being responsiveness.