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I develop a very complex, 500K+ LoC Java application. It implements a natural language sentence parser that is integrated with a specialized lossless data compr

I develop a very complex, 500K+ LoC Java application. It implements a natural language sentence parser that is integrated with a specialized lossless data compressor. I use: - No IDE, just a simple text editor - No ORM, hand-written SQL code - My build tool is a Python script that marshals a javac call - I have just a few JAR file dependencies, which are checked into the repo - My own simple unit test and integration test framework For me, Java Just Works. It's literally been years since I've encountered a problem with the actual language. Yeah, there can be a lot of boilerplate. Yeah, there are some issues with complex type manipulation. But those limitations almost never cause me any real pain.

wheresvic1 8y ago
Yours is a very niche case where you built an application that is perhaps used by other applications downstream. The author's gripes are mostly with the day-to-day java web application development that is being done in large firms (which I could even believe is the majority of Java development work).
bborud 8y ago
What made you create your own build tool rather than use Maven or Gradle? Ditto for the unit tests; why does JUnit not fit you?
- bausshf 8y ago
  A shot in the sky: The project might have started before those and/or he's in the mindset of reinventing the wheel instead of learning new tools
- d_burfoot 8y ago
  I only introduce new dependencies into my system when I see them as strictly necessary. I am completely satisfied with my alternative implementations of those components (this is in contrast to the IDE question, where I at least see the benefit of tools like autocomplete that the IDE provides, but choose not to use it because the benefit of simplicity is greater). Given the rage and anger the OP directs against Maven, I think I am completely justified in that choice.
  - bborud 8y ago
    I can understand where you are coming from, and I often follow a rather similar approach where I will implement things myself if the alternative is depending on some unwieldy beast of a dependency. (I did write my own Servlet engine for a project once, and it was faster than Jetty, and had better GC characteristics at the time, but in the end I ditched it for Jetty as I didn't want to maintain a complete HTTP implementation - that wasn't key to the project. The extra performance and the dependencies I got rid of were just not worth the extra effort). However the reason I always chose to use JUnit was because I wanted the unit tests to be familiar to other developers since this is often where people go to understand how a piece of code works. In a sense it was a part of Java at the time. And I chose Maven for similar reasons. Plus the fact that Maven wasn't something you could really escape from in Java. Sooner or later it rears its head and I thought I would cause less pain if I just accepted that. I like the idea behind Maven: convention over configuration, but I've never been a fan of how that idea has been executed. It could have been better if someone more experienced (and obsessive) had designed it way back when. I still think Gradle is worse than Maven though. I'm not a fan of scriptable build systems, they should be declarative (and most of the time when people think they need to script things they just haven't bothered to learn how to use the tools). And even if you use Gradle, you can't really escape dealing with Maven. (I ditched Java a couple of years back, so I haven't done Java for a while. I'm not overly fond of Oracle, so I had promised myself that I would stop using Java as soon as I found a replacement language that suited me. It took a few years, but I eventually found a different language I liked even better: Go)

wheresvic1 8y ago

Yours is a very niche case where you built an application that is perhaps used by other applications downstream. The author's gripes are mostly with the day-to-day java web application development that is being done in large firms (which I could even believe is the majority of Java development work).

bborud 8y ago

What made you create your own build tool rather than use Maven or Gradle? Ditto for the unit tests; why does JUnit not fit you?

bausshf 8y ago
A shot in the sky: The project might have started before those and/or he's in the mindset of reinventing the wheel instead of learning new tools
d_burfoot 8y ago
I only introduce new dependencies into my system when I see them as strictly necessary. I am completely satisfied with my alternative implementations of those components (this is in contrast to the IDE question, where I at least see the benefit of tools like autocomplete that the IDE provides, but choose not to use it because the benefit of simplicity is greater). Given the rage and anger the OP directs against Maven, I think I am completely justified in that choice.
- bborud 8y ago
  I can understand where you are coming from, and I often follow a rather similar approach where I will implement things myself if the alternative is depending on some unwieldy beast of a dependency. (I did write my own Servlet engine for a project once, and it was faster than Jetty, and had better GC characteristics at the time, but in the end I ditched it for Jetty as I didn't want to maintain a complete HTTP implementation - that wasn't key to the project. The extra performance and the dependencies I got rid of were just not worth the extra effort). However the reason I always chose to use JUnit was because I wanted the unit tests to be familiar to other developers since this is often where people go to understand how a piece of code works. In a sense it was a part of Java at the time. And I chose Maven for similar reasons. Plus the fact that Maven wasn't something you could really escape from in Java. Sooner or later it rears its head and I thought I would cause less pain if I just accepted that. I like the idea behind Maven: convention over configuration, but I've never been a fan of how that idea has been executed. It could have been better if someone more experienced (and obsessive) had designed it way back when. I still think Gradle is worse than Maven though. I'm not a fan of scriptable build systems, they should be declarative (and most of the time when people think they need to script things they just haven't bothered to learn how to use the tools). And even if you use Gradle, you can't really escape dealing with Maven. (I ditched Java a couple of years back, so I haven't done Java for a while. I'm not overly fond of Oracle, so I had promised myself that I would stop using Java as soon as I found a replacement language that suited me. It took a few years, but I eventually found a different language I liked even better: Go)