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Comment by gigatexal | Hacker News Reader

+1 to the usefulness of a REPL. Anyone know of a good one for the vanilla Java language?

I don't, but I'll point out you can do a lot of exploration in the Clojure repl, and with leiningen it's really easy to set up anything in maven.

I must have a really low I.Q. Or something because maven is all but broken in intellij for me. The Apache quickstart template defaults to jdk 5?!? And the pom file seems like it could get out of control fast.

Sorry, by "in maven" I meant "in a maven repository". Using Maven itself is a nightmare, I know, but if what you need is to download some jars and stick them on the classpath, leiningen is perfect (it even compiles regular Java and has control over JDK versions if you want that)

And it generates the pom files so you don't have to...

I guess I just need to read up on how to actually use maven the right way. Thanks.

I wouldn't use Maven, but there are multiple tools that can use Maven repositories that aren't Maven, and I'd recommend one of those. :)

I was only trying to learn it because a take home coding assignment for an interview asked to use maven for its build process. I found the whole experience (using maven) disheartening while I was able to code up the assignment using maven and my inexperience with it cost me going to the second round. I have only myself to blame though.

That sucks :(. But I can tell you there are plenty of organisations (e.g. Thoughtworks) where Maven is regarded as a bad tool that should be avoided. That doesn't help you much if it's part of a job you want, though. :(

If you don't mind something online, I hear repl.it is pretty good.

Well, I've used an unmaintained almost-vanilla-Java REPL: https://github.com/jacktasia/java-repl

There is an official one coming out in Java 9 soon.

Looking forward to it!

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