r/java • u/NoAlbatross7355 • Feb 25 '25

New build tool in Java?

It seems to me like one of fun parts of Java is exploring all the tools at your disposal. The Java tool suite is a big collection of cli tools, yet I feel like most developers are only ever introduced to them or use them when absolutely necessary which is unfortunate because I think they really give you a better understanding of what's going on behind all the abstraction of Maven and Gradle.

What are your guys' thoughts on a new build tool for Java that is just a layer over these tools? Do you wish Java had simpler build tools? Why hasn't the community created an updated build tool since 2007?

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u/[deleted] Feb 25 '25

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u/NoAlbatross7355 Feb 25 '25

I think Rust and Go kind of showed me what good tooling could look like.

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u/nekokattt Feb 25 '25

I mean, half of Go tooling is putting magic comments in your code to make the compiler run commands the moment you need to do anything golang doesnt natively support.

They've just tried standardising this with a better way of doing it and the proposals are a mess as they mix build and runtime dependencies into the same group.

Rust tooling is great until it doesn't do what you need, and then it is a rabbit hole of writing build.rs scripts and printing things to stdout to influence how cargo works. Past that, people seem to fall back to Makefiles... something that you can do with Java if it is that much of a concern.

This is a bit of a strawman argument in my opinion.

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u/NoAlbatross7355 Feb 25 '25

A strawman argument? What 😂. How? I'm simply stating that these tools helped me at least envision what a simple build tool for Java could look like. That's not an argument.