Maven features I wish Gradle had: inlined plugins

Since the early days of Maven the development team recognized that they couldn’t (and shouldn’t) provide a solution for every problem we as consumers may face with our builds. In order to cater for our every whim and emerging requirements the Maven build tool added a pluggable mechanism to provide behavior as needed, and thus Maven plugins were born. Maven plugins are typically configured inside a <build> block found in the pom.xml file, which lets them contribute goals that may bind to lifecycle phases by default, or just providing goals that you can invoke at any time. But what if Read More


Gum 0.8.0 is out!

Whoa, 2 Gum releases in the same month? I’m having so much fun working with and on Gum that I just couldn’t resist posting another release. Last time I mentioned that Gum is capable of launching JBang with explicit and implicit targets; in the case of implicit a strict file order was to be followed: .java, .jsh, and .jar. Well no more, Gum 0.8.0 let’s you configure the resolution order as you deem necessary. The configuration may be per directory (project) or global. Which brings me to the second major feature added to this release, how do you know which Read More


Maven features I wish Gradle had: override task properties

It’s no secret that one of the most common properties ever set on a Maven build is -DskipTests which as the name implies, instructs Maven to skip running tests. As a matter of fact that property is read by the maven-surefire-plugin to figure out if it should run tests or not. As it turns out there’s a separate property named skip that instructs Maven to skip compiling and running tests. If you’re curious and peek at the documentation you may notice that the field/property names for skipTest match but for skip you’ll find a property named maven.test.skip. As it happens, Read More


Maven features I wish Gradle had: summary reports

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

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

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


Why do the Gradle/Maven wrappers matter?

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 voilĂ ! 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


Gum: the Gradle/Maven wrapper

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

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


Announcing the PomChecker project

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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