best practices - multi-project interaction

One nice feature of maven is the simplicity of mapping multiple completely self-contained projects together. For example, a company was two seperate teams that work on Project A and Project B. Between the two of them they have a set of shared Components.

Project A and Project B can be setup independently of each other, and the Components can be setup as a Project C with its own root pom that builds out all of the components. Developers now have two options, they can maintain two seperate projects of source, one of Project A (or B) and another of Project C. Or they can simply mount the Project C in a subdirectory and reference it as a <module>project-c</module> in the parent pom of Project A and B. The build artifacts of Project C will automatically be factored into the build environment.

a thought

not sure if this is a useful thought or not but..

root project pom: company.poms:project:version
projects pom: company:project:version
subprojects pom: company.project:subproject:version

Since the root pom isn't the same as the core project's pom (where the primary project source is) you can't just refer to the root pom as the company:project:version since that would mean the project itself would have to have some hokey artifact like company:project-core:version or something. So to get away from that and maintain the project pom reference I went with the idea of company.poms:project:version.

I like it since the company has a project and that artifact has that project in it, and all projects at the company can use the company.poms:project setup so all top level root poms are in the same place in the repository.

repo ends up like

company/poms/proja
company/poms/projb
company/poms/shared

company/proja
company/proja/part1
company/proja/part2

company/projb
company/projb/part1
company/projb/part2

company/shared/thingy1
company/shared/thingy2