[Users] Managing development of "big" GeoExt application

[Daryl Herzmann]

Greetings GeoExt Community,

I've been happily hacking away on a javascript application that utilizes the
following libraries:

 - JQuery
 - Strophe
 - Google Maps API
 - SoundManager2
 - Sencha ExtJS
 - GeoExt
 - OpenLayers

The application is basically a BOSH Jabber client with geo-spatial
chatrooms.  Anyway, I am really struggling with the following concepts and
was hoping folks could provide guidance or weblinks for me to read up on.

 1) How to layout a directory to develop this application?  Do you use
    sym links, how should the folders be organized?  What all gets
    managed by subversion?

 2) What options are there for minified builders?  Currently, I pull in
    the full release libraries of the above into my app.  Yes, I realize
    this is a terrible thing to do, thus my questions here. :)  I have
    been messing around with Google Closure Compiler and am building my
    code just fine with it, but am not sure how best to proceed with
    custom building geoext/openlayers/extjs .

 3) Are there established practices for keeping track of dependencies for
    the build process?  Or is it all manually configured in some simple
    build script?

And just for some feedback on GeoExt (probably showing my ignorance again),
I wish:

 - one could provide an array of styles to unique styling rules, instead
   of only one per lookup value.

 - The same radio button logic of baselayers could more easily be applied
   to overlay groups.  I figured it out eventually.

 - There was a tighter way to tie one layeropacityslider to a treenode of
   layers.

 - Having static WMS legends (non WMS GetLegend images) appear in a map
   friendly location.

I suspect all the above are 'easy to do', but I struggle with doing it! I'm
also the least sharp tool in the toolbox :)

thanks for your time!
  daryl