Maven features I wish Gradle had: summary reports

Posted on by aalmiray

For quite some time now, Maven users have grown accustomed to seeing a summary report when a build is run. The report appears at two locations: at the beginning of the build where Maven shows the projects that participate in the current session (or Reactor if you prefer) which gives you a clue of how many projects, their packaging selection (jar, pom, etc), and perhaps more importantly, in which order they will be processed. The second location is at the end of the build where each project display its status (SUCCESS, FAILURE, SKIPPED) plus the time it took to execute Read More

Gum 0.7.2 delivers more bang for your buck

Posted on by aalmiray

A bang, like in JBang! That’s right, JBang is the new kid on the block in the Java command line tool space. Initially taking advantage of JEP-330 that enhances the Java launcher to support single source files, JBang builds on top of that idea and adds dependency resolution, JShell integration, launch executable JARs, launch scripts from trusted URLs, and a few other goodies. In other words, JBang is not constrained by JEP-330 (which requires Java 11) as it also let’s you run scripts with Java 8. Taking a hint from Gradle and Maven, JBang also adds a wrapper to help Read More

Gum 0.4.0 latest tricks

Posted on by aalmiray

Gum 0.4.0 is out and it comes with a few goodies! If you’re like me you may see yourself switching between Maven and Gradle projects, a lot. This constant switching makes it very likely that I’ll mess up the command invocation and send Maven goals to a Gradle project, or send Gradle tasks to a Maven project. This results in a wasted JVM iteration as the command fails. But what if there was a way to make it work given certain mappings? What if Maven’s compile goal could be translated into Gradle’s classes or viceversa? What if these mappings were Read More

Declarative Gradle builds, is it possible?

Posted on by aalmiray

I’ve been thinking about 100% declarative Gradle builds for quite some time now. As of June 2020 Gradle offers not one but two different DSLs based on programming languages (Groovy and Kotlin) for defining the steps that the build should take to do its thing. For years developers were used to adding whatever code was “necessary” to make the build turn its gears, regardless of the consequences. In recent times the push has been to move those pieces of code into plugins, simplifying the build files themselves, and also promising less actual code in the build files. Yet, one can Read More

Why do the Gradle/Maven wrappers matter?

Posted on by aalmiray

Indeed, why do these tool exist and why should I use them? After all installing Gradle or Maven is a simple task. Just download a ZIP file, configure an environment variable and voilà! Or use a package manager such as SdkMan! Well to understand these questions we must travel back in time, to a moment when Gradle was just getting started and Maven 3 was just a few months of being released. Gradle’s inception happened sometime in late 2007. In comparison Maven was at 2.0.7 or 2.0.8 (see history of Maven release notes). Everyone knew Maven at that time but Read More

Jumping into Go

Posted on by aalmiray

I finally did it. I jumped into Go and I like it. Many years ago (7 or so?) a dear friend of mine told me about Go and that I should give it a try. He did warn me that the language felt like Java of the olden days, back when Java was 1.0, but despite this Go was a pretty good language. I did give Go a try a few times in the past, even presented a couple of times (at work and abroad) about the similarities and differences between Java and Go from a Java developer’s POV, yet Read More

Gum: the Gradle/Maven wrapper

Posted on by aalmiray

I’m happy to announce the immediate availability of Gum, a Gradle/Maven wrapper written in Go. Gum is inspired on the popular gdub script by Doug Borg, which was ported to Go by Sten Roger Sandvik some time ago. The main difference from Sten’s version is that Gum also supports the Maven wrapper, coming up as part of Maven core 3.7! The basic idea behind Gum is to prefer the tool wrapper over the plain tool, if the wrapper is configured. It also allows you invoke the build tool from any place withing the project’s codebase. There are a few additions Read More

Publishing artifacts to Maven Central with Bintray & Gradle

Posted on by aalmiray

Recently I joined a conversation on Twitter where the OP complained to spending hours to get a brand new computer setup to publish artifacts to Maven Central. The issue stemmed from having PGP signature files moved from one location to another. There are other issues that may arise when uploading artifacts to Maven Central, specially when doing it for the first time. The rules for publishing artifacts are stated here. A common mistake is to omit one of the required POM elements, which will likely trigger a series of back-and-forth revisions until you get it right. This can be frustrating Read More

Does Gradle need build profile support?

Posted on by aalmiray

The need for customizing a build based on a particular environment is a prevalent one. Maven offers an option called build profiles which lets you customize certain aspects of the build but not all. However on the Gradle side of things, there’s no such feature found in core, with the argument being that contrasted to what Maven offers as means for defining build files (a limited XML based DSL), Gradle offers not one but two DSLs based on full programming languages. This allows developers use the same control flows they’re used to in production and test code but on build Read More

Announcing the PomChecker project

Posted on by aalmiray

I’m happy to announce the immediate availability of the PomChecker suite! What is it you ask? It’s a small set of utilities to verify that a POM or BOM file complies with the minimum requirements for being uploaded to Maven Central. I wish an utility like this existed years ago when I started publishing artifacts to Maven Central. It took me a few tries in the beginning to get the POM files just right. Recently I’ve seen other developers struggling with these rules as well. Hopefully these utilities can help them and others get on the road much faster. There Read More

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