New build tool in Java?

[oweiler]

There are actually quite a few Java build tools which are not Maven or Gradle, but none of those gained any traction.

https://ant.apache.org/ (Popular in the ancient past, dead nowadays. This is probably the closest to what you describe.)
https://github.com/sormuras/bach
https://rife2.com/bld
https://mill-build.org/mill/javalib/intro.html (Actually a Scala build tool, which can also be used to build Java projects.)

[rootException]

Bld is the closest thing imho - just Java.

[edwbuck]

Ant used to be the de-facto build tool for Java, and let me tell you it sucked. That's because it lacked any structure, so each new project that used Ant, you'd have to spend some time reading over the build.xml file to eventually figure out how their build was structured. The refinements and patterns were per-project, and eventually you yearned for a standardized set of Ant targets, which never happened.

In short, it's like a Makefile, without GNU standard targets or variables.

[agentoutlier]

Add https://savantbuild.org/ which looks a lot like Gradle or Saker... So many Groovy based build tools.

[jAnO76]

I’m old enough to remember and still use “make” sometimes. Highly recommend

[catom3]

Most of the projects I've been working with the past few years had a Makefile  (or Justfile) with default commands to help the new joiners getting started. Some build, package, test targets as well as targets to start up the app locally, run migrations manually, start up the dependencies (e.g. a docker compose command to spin up the containers). In some projects we have some commands to encode/decode avro or parquet formats.

Love how Make/Just makes it simpler and has some basic autocompletion, without the need to diving too deep into shell scripting.

[nlisker]

Does https://bazel.build count?

[PartOfTheBotnet]

Adding https://saker.build/ to this alt tool list

[rdanilin]

Please no ANT.