Nice article! I've been working on a medium-scale Java project with a friend the past few weeks, with him using Eclipse and I using Vim. Eclipse is nice for certain things, however he has definitely wasted more time trying to placate Eclipse when packages weren't set up right.

I'm using an external tool kit to aid in my project, so I've added a "source /path/to/setup.sh" in my .bashrc so I never have to worry about "Symbol Not Found" errors during compilation. Doing it via a Makefile seems to take out the middleman though, I like that idea better.