Patent ID: 7765520

Claim:
A system for managing cross project dependencies at development time of an application program being executed on a computing device, comprising: a data structure stored in a memory, said data structure comprising information that embodies software project dependency relationships used by said application program, said information comprising: a plurality of class path level (CPL) nodes, each of said nodes comprising a list of one or more source files associated with a project and a binary-path; and wherein the binary-path is an ordered list that includes references to directories, JAR files, locations of binary files, and other CPL nodes, wherein the order of elements in the binary path determines a search priority for resources that a corresponding project depends on, and a reference to a CPL node in a binary path indicates that a project depends on code in another project, wherein a notification is generated when a change in a first software project affects a second software project based on the software project dependency relationships embodied in the data structure, and wherein the data structure identifies common components shared between projects, and the data structure only maintains a single copy of each of the common components that are shared between the projects.