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Interesting discussion here. I've been very happy with Gradle for my first major JVM project, a small Kotlin API with a simple build configuration (https://gith

Interesting discussion here. I've been very happy with Gradle for my first major JVM project, a small Kotlin API with a simple build configuration (https://github.com/thomasboyt/jam-buds/blob/master/rhiannon/build.gradle.kts https://github.com/thomasboyt/jam-buds/blob/master/rhiannon/...). I suppose I'm not surprised to see more complaints from folks who have worked with it on much longer-lived and _much_ more complex projects. I've been thinking of taking a peek into Java, which I've never really written[1]. Is the general thinking that, for something like a Spring Boot application, it's much better to just start with Maven? I'll admit I am, aesthetically, displeased with the mountains of XML config I've seen in some tutorial articles, but I imagine it's a lot simpler to maintain over time than any DSL would be. [1] slightly off-topic, but if anyone's curious why: I haven't been very impressed by any of the "Kotlin-first" JVM libraries I've seen (like ktor or exposed), I think coroutines are neat but much more suitable for main-thread-focused situations like Android apps than something more easily threaded like web servers (and with Project Loom hopefully upcoming in the next couple years this might be a moot point soon), and I don't like the JetBrains tooling lock-in (e.g there's no well-supported language server for Kotlin, unlike what Red Hat's been building for Java)

lmm 5y ago
> I've been thinking of taking a peek into Java, which I've never really written[1]. Is the general thinking that, for something like a Spring Boot application, it's much better to just start with Maven? I'll admit I am, aesthetically, displeased with the mountains of XML config I've seen in some tutorial articles, but I imagine it's a lot simpler to maintain over time than any DSL would be. If you're using Spring Boot then you might as well also use Gradle, since they're the same kind of write-only incomprehensible system (I wouldn't be surprised if they were made by the same people). But yes if you want to be able to maintain your build definition for the long term and actually understand how it works rather than cargo-cult copy/pasting snippets and praying then Maven is a much better tool.
fiddlerwoaroof 5y ago
At my last job, one of the onboarding tasks was writing a simple Java servlet that met a specification: the only two rules were (1) 100% unit test coverage of all the code you wrote and (2) you should be able to explain every line of every file in the repository. After I finished that and from my later experience with Maven, I really don’t find maven all that scary: writing all the XML isn’t my favorite thing to do, but it’s surprisingly straightforward to get a minimal pom.xml that works for 80% of the projects you work on.

lmm 5y ago

> I've been thinking of taking a peek into Java, which I've never really written[1]. Is the general thinking that, for something like a Spring Boot application, it's much better to just start with Maven? I'll admit I am, aesthetically, displeased with the mountains of XML config I've seen in some tutorial articles, but I imagine it's a lot simpler to maintain over time than any DSL would be. If you're using Spring Boot then you might as well also use Gradle, since they're the same kind of write-only incomprehensible system (I wouldn't be surprised if they were made by the same people). But yes if you want to be able to maintain your build definition for the long term and actually understand how it works rather than cargo-cult copy/pasting snippets and praying then Maven is a much better tool.

fiddlerwoaroof 5y ago

At my last job, one of the onboarding tasks was writing a simple Java servlet that met a specification: the only two rules were (1) 100% unit test coverage of all the code you wrote and (2) you should be able to explain every line of every file in the repository. After I finished that and from my later experience with Maven, I really don’t find maven all that scary: writing all the XML isn’t my favorite thing to do, but it’s surprisingly straightforward to get a minimal pom.xml that works for 80% of the projects you work on.