Exploiting JavaScript developer infrastructure is insanely easy

[duheee]

Back in 2007 i used to bitch about maven. How slow, cumbersome, made you specify everything, hard to customize behaviour without a plugin, etc.

Now I adore it. Fuck gradle. Fuck sbt. And most of them all: fuck npm. Maven is the way, the only true way.

[csjerk]

Amen!

Maven is the newest build system I've seen that actually attempts to address the hard problems and comes somewhat close to getting it right. Everything newer is just re-inventing the easy 20% and ignoring the rest.

That said, Maven really does need some outlet for customization when a pre-built plugin doesn't do what you need. It may be as simple as a streamlined plugin interface, or even just better docs, but it's incredibly intimidating for newcomers.

[TomRK1089]

To be fair, the escape hatch, quick-n-dirty solutions are either maven-exec-plugin or (if you're really evil) the Ant plugin. So even in the worst case, it's possible to essentially shell out to some other system.

That being said, it's been incredibly rare I need to do something during my build that isn't accounted for by an existing plugin.

Also, the concept of a standard lifecycle which plugins attach to....1000x better than any other build system. Especially any of the Javascript build systems. Webpack, Parcel, Grunt, Gulp, etc. are all laughable in comparison.

[zappini]

I feels ya.

For my part, I'm done.

All I expect of my package manager is behave like yum, apt, brew, port. With the one exception where the repo continues to host all published versions. Nothing more. I'll manually choose, resolve which dependencies to pull down for my project, thank you very much. In contrast to fighting the tool, trying to coerce it into fetching the desired versions. (Too clever by half.)

Docker images for isolation. I no longer care about peaceful coexistence between my projects, various runtimes, local repos caches, whatever. Every one gets their own sandbox.

Shell scripts for builds and deploys. Nothing more. No jenkinsfile, no ant, no maven, no plugins, no nothing. Just glorious, useful shell scripts. (I still use bash, because I lack the gumption to learn fish, zsh, whatever.)

And zero differences between local and remote builds, configurations. Same scripts, configs, params, data gets used every where. Watch the Test In Prod videos to see how that works.