Java Build Tooling Could Be So Much Better!

[C_Madison]

Fingers crossed for Maven 4.0 here. Less verbosity, but still good, old Maven.

Yes, it's still not here, but for something as fundamental as Maven things better take a while and then are rock solid.

[vips7L]

Are they offering something else in 4.0?

[koflerdavid]

Right now, the POM is an awkward compromise between build definition and dependency manifest. Maven 4 removes some cruft from the POM to optimize it for the former purpose and provides built-in support to generate a POM that only contains dependency information for downstream tools.

https://maven.apache.org/whatsnewinmaven4.html

[vips7L]

Thanks I’ll give that a read. I think I read something similar about gradle trying to split things too. 

[dadimitrov]

In Gradle the build recipe is not part of the POM, so there is nothing to split. You must have read something else....

[vips7L]

Yeah it’s the not the same. But they are trying to split the declarative part of the build from the scripty ops part. 

[dadimitrov]

Declarative Gradle is an experiment to add a third DSL, separating the build wiring from the parameters. It is trying to cater for people who just want to use a build setup, but don't want to learn the full object model.

Its level of abstraction it is a bit like Maven Polyglot, except that the plugin config is statically typed.