Comment by ben-schaaf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ben-schaaf | Hacker News Reader

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The command to set up a Dropwizard project according to the getting started guide[0] is:

    mvn archetype:generate -DarchetypeGroupId=io.dropwizard.archetypes -DarchetypeArtifactId=java-simple -DarchetypeVersion=1.0.0

Which spends the first 30 seconds downloading a bunch of stuff before asking you for settings to start off your project. I then read the README it created and ran `mvn clean install` as instructed which started downloads that took 1:40 min only to end in a build failure with multiple large tracebacks.

Running `mvn --help` doesn't help at all and the pom file it creates is 143 lines of hard to read XML.

I've used gradle a little, I'm familiar with bundler/gem, pip, npm and dub. Maven just makes me want to run as far as possible from anything Java related.

[0] http://www.dropwizard.io/1.1.0/docs/getting-started.html

You just described my experience with npm, except there aren't any useful tracebacks, just a note absolving npm of all blame and advising me to contact some random module author.

Edit: and of course with npm the annoying downloads happen every time for each project, instead of once per dependency version...

Not excusing any crashes for npm (having those for any package manager sucks), but `npm init` doesn't download anything or make a project that needs to, it has readable config files and `npm --help` at least gives you a list of commands. A lot of the small stuff goes a long way to making things more approachable.

> `npm --help` at least gives you a list of commands

`mvn --help` gives you a list of commands too.

That's apples and oranges. You would have to set up some Express project or something to do what the Dropwizard archetype is doing.

Also package.json and pom.xml are equally (un)readable. At least Maven project files have a schema to help editors out.

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