How to Layout Folders Locally and in Svn When Using Eclipse

I've been working with eclipse and SVN for many years in teams from a single developer up to 12 and I always was the one to setup our folder structure. I managed to get it working somehow, but I feel that my folder layout is far from optimal. It's hard to tell what my typical folder layout looked like, because it looked very different each time.

I'm just starting another big project now, and I want to do it the professional way this time.

Facts about the project

Those are the facts right now:

• All developers will work with Eclipse
• Some will be using Subclipse to integrate SVN into Eclipse, others will use external clients like Tortoise SVN or svnX
• we're developing on Windows and Mac OS
• we're using ant to automate building and junit testing
• there will be multiple interrelated projects:
  • a library written in pure java, so it runs on all known java platforms
  • several applications for several java plattforms (J2SE, J2ME, android...). All those applications depend on the library mentioned before

What to do with .project?

I'm alway unsure wether to commit those files generated by eclipse (like ''.project'' and ''.classpath''). In prior projects, sometimes we put them into the SVN, sometimes we didn't, and both approaches had ther pros and cons. Once, we even committed the whole workspace, but that seemed to be a bad idea.

One key concept that I'm certainly missing is how Eclipse handles its workspace. By default, the whole project lies inside the workspace-folder, but there can be projects that are external, which are linked in some magic manner I just don't understand.