3 ms·

I find it's pretty straightforward using gradle (except that it doesn't build fat jars out of the box). Can you elaborate on what you're having trouble with?

saulrh 9y ago
I didn't try gradle and my experiences weren't incredibly recent (three-five years in most cases), so maybe that's what I was missing. Dependencies and portability were by far the biggest issues. eclipse, netbeans, idea, et al didn't seem to do dependencies at all; even if you had a library jar actually on your filesystem it was a huge PITA to point at it, and getting a project that'd also compile on someone else's machine was horrible. leiningen didn't have a single tutorial that I could find and I voodoo'd my way through a clojure tutorial before giving up. maven broke in strange ways when I tried pulling in deps and figuring out the correct incantations in the pom files was a pain. More recently, I could probably have gotten along with sbt if I'd had a week to play with it, but it also has the "no useful tutorials" problem and I was on a time limit. Some of this is certainly lack of experience, or even simple Doin It Rong. I could see maven being much easier with a directory full of examples to look at, for example, and sbt I'm sure is great once you wrap your head around it. I just feel like, even if I was limited by typing bandwidth instead of figuring-things-out bandwidth, those tools wouldn't hold a candle to python's or rust's tooling. Even makefiles and cmake seem to have better happy paths. I'll look at gradle next time. There are situation where I could use a jar.
- lmm 9y ago
  > eclipse, netbeans, idea, et al didn't seem to do dependencies at all; even if you had a library jar actually on your filesystem it was a huge PITA to point at it, and getting a project that'd also compile on someone else's machine was horrible. These things are oriented towards working with a dependency management/project management thing rather than manually specifying libraries. I'd really recommend maven, using the IDE's integration with it, particularly if you're getting started - Gradle can be more concise but it's definitely buggier and less well documented/supported. > maven broke in strange ways when I tried pulling in deps and figuring out the correct incantations in the pom files was a pain Dependencies should just work unless you were trying to do something weird like using jars from the local filesystem - don't do that (if you really must, install them into the local maven repository and use them from there: https://maven.apache.org/guides/mini/guide-3rd-party-jars-local.html https://maven.apache.org/guides/mini/guide-3rd-party-jars-lo... ). You shouldn't need any incantations, just simple XML that should autocomplete in the IDE, or you can use a GUI rather than directly - e.g. in eclipse you just right click on the project -> maven -> add dependency, and search/select the library you want. Do you remember what problem you had more specifically? > Some of this is certainly lack of experience, or even simple Doin It Rong. I could see maven being much easier with a directory full of examples to look at, for example, and sbt I'm sure is great once you wrap your head around it. I just feel like, even if I was limited by typing bandwidth instead of figuring-things-out bandwidth, those tools wouldn't hold a candle to python's or rust's tooling. Even makefiles and cmake seem to have better happy paths. SBT is awful throughout, but my experience is that Maven is much much better than anything in Python-land (no messing around and mode switching with virtualenv, no need to separately run pip, one consistent tool that everyone uses, one packaging format, one central repository, better integration of testing with the project), and directly comparable to Cargo.

saulrh 9y ago

I didn't try gradle and my experiences weren't incredibly recent (three-five years in most cases), so maybe that's what I was missing. Dependencies and portability were by far the biggest issues. eclipse, netbeans, idea, et al didn't seem to do dependencies at all; even if you had a library jar actually on your filesystem it was a huge PITA to point at it, and getting a project that'd also compile on someone else's machine was horrible. leiningen didn't have a single tutorial that I could find and I voodoo'd my way through a clojure tutorial before giving up. maven broke in strange ways when I tried pulling in deps and figuring out the correct incantations in the pom files was a pain. More recently, I could probably have gotten along with sbt if I'd had a week to play with it, but it also has the "no useful tutorials" problem and I was on a time limit. Some of this is certainly lack of experience, or even simple Doin It Rong. I could see maven being much easier with a directory full of examples to look at, for example, and sbt I'm sure is great once you wrap your head around it. I just feel like, even if I was limited by typing bandwidth instead of figuring-things-out bandwidth, those tools wouldn't hold a candle to python's or rust's tooling. Even makefiles and cmake seem to have better happy paths. I'll look at gradle next time. There are situation where I could use a jar.

lmm 9y ago
> eclipse, netbeans, idea, et al didn't seem to do dependencies at all; even if you had a library jar actually on your filesystem it was a huge PITA to point at it, and getting a project that'd also compile on someone else's machine was horrible. These things are oriented towards working with a dependency management/project management thing rather than manually specifying libraries. I'd really recommend maven, using the IDE's integration with it, particularly if you're getting started - Gradle can be more concise but it's definitely buggier and less well documented/supported. > maven broke in strange ways when I tried pulling in deps and figuring out the correct incantations in the pom files was a pain Dependencies should just work unless you were trying to do something weird like using jars from the local filesystem - don't do that (if you really must, install them into the local maven repository and use them from there: https://maven.apache.org/guides/mini/guide-3rd-party-jars-local.html https://maven.apache.org/guides/mini/guide-3rd-party-jars-lo... ). You shouldn't need any incantations, just simple XML that should autocomplete in the IDE, or you can use a GUI rather than directly - e.g. in eclipse you just right click on the project -> maven -> add dependency, and search/select the library you want. Do you remember what problem you had more specifically? > Some of this is certainly lack of experience, or even simple Doin It Rong. I could see maven being much easier with a directory full of examples to look at, for example, and sbt I'm sure is great once you wrap your head around it. I just feel like, even if I was limited by typing bandwidth instead of figuring-things-out bandwidth, those tools wouldn't hold a candle to python's or rust's tooling. Even makefiles and cmake seem to have better happy paths. SBT is awful throughout, but my experience is that Maven is much much better than anything in Python-land (no messing around and mode switching with virtualenv, no need to separately run pip, one consistent tool that everyone uses, one packaging format, one central repository, better integration of testing with the project), and directly comparable to Cargo.