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Java-the-language is a fairly crummy thing to work with, it’s Java-the-ecosystem that’s genuinely good — the JVM, the tooling, etc etc. The quality of IDEs available is definitely a very large component of that. Doing Java on a lightweight editor seems like a way to pay the price without reaping the benefits.

I use TextMate (!) to maintain an Android SDK that's a mix of Java, C and C++ avoiding Android Studio like the plague, to maintain an iOS SDK that's mostly Objective-C, similarly avoiding Xcode's editor, and to maintain the backend written in Python that these SDK's talk to. I've got enough going on in my head w/o having to deal with the complexity of two different IDEs.

Anyway, for me Java-the-language is fine. The tooling, at least as it comes with Android (looking at you gradle and all its Android plugins) is what makes me want to pull my hair out.

I've not done any Android development but how is IntelliJ for it? While it can be slow on big codebases and obviously never as responsive as vim in a terminal, I think the tooling is excellent.

But again, you have to spend a month or so learning the shortcuts.

I haven’t used IntelliJ, only Android Studio which I know is based on IntelliJ but don’t know how much they differ. I find it to be a klunky UI and it easily eats all the CPU on a 2015 3.1 GHz MBP doing things like self-updating, downloading newer SDK versions, re-indexing a small repo, etc. I personally find it pretty unusable. There’s also parts of the UI you can’t even access (like the SDK manager and the AVD manager) unless you have a project open. It’s pretty obviously not a Mac native tool. I assume (hope anyway) it’s much better on Linux.

IntelliJ has an excellent vim keybinding plugin which I use (having come from Linux/scripting/Vim background to Java). Intellij also makes setting shortcuts pretty easy so you can customize to your needs. Having used both Eclipse and IntelliJ, I prefer the latter.

To a couple of those -

Compared to the other options, Gradle (IMO) significantly reduces the package & project management overhead. That said, it's still relatively high insofar as you are still asked to keep track of things like whether a dependency is needed at compile time, run time, or test time.

Java-the-language has a symbiotic relationship with heavyweight IDEs. The language's development is as influenced by the popularity of IDEs in its community every bit as much as the popularity of IDEs in its community is motivated by the language's characteristics. If you're looking for a good lightweight editor experience, I'd suggest looking at alternative JVM languages. Any of {Groovy, Clojure, Kotlin, Scala} will give you a better non-IDE experience while still giving you full access to the ecosystem. (That said, everyone still codes those in IntelliJ, too. It's still not gonna feel like working in Go.)

Lastly, it's totally OK to tune out the ecosystem when you don't need to be plugged into it. Yes, there are a bazillion JSON libraries out there. And you can easily spend more time and energy agonizing over their differences than you could possibly save by choosing the right one. Similarly, go ahead and ignore Spring. The whole Spring Experience™ is designed around developing applications a certain way. If you like to develop applications that way, you will know in your soul that Spring is right for you, and be attracted to it like a cat to an open can of tuna, and you would already have been a deeply devoted Java developer for years now.

Maven doesn’t have a lot of overhead, if you don’t overengineer your POM and use shared parent between multiple projects. It requires some DevOps thinking, but in the end typical project POM will be just a list of dependencies and basic metadata.

> What I really want is to get a "lite" Java project like this up and running with all of the smart people's opinions in place that I can develop entirely in a lite editor (preferably without XML anywhere).

That's pretty much the original value proposition for Spring Boot. "I just want to get to work".

I used Spring Boot before encountering a Spring 3 project. The difference is phenomenal.

Disclosure: I work for Pivotal, which sponsors Spring.

Spring boot still requires gradle, which is much more complex than naive use of npm or python pip.

In the long run java build tools are better, but due to the learning curve a lot of folks balk (leave) and use a different stack.

Whoever is in charge of openJDK should just adopt kotlin as java 14 even if it was Not Invented Here.

Spring Boot works with both Gradle and Maven.

https://start.spring.io/

Try a Spring Boot app using Gradle as the build tool.

Weblogic and all those app servers were a product of a different time. They solve problems that are largely solved other ways now (you could argue for some of their features). Spring Boot ships the web server in the application which is more akin to Rails, node etc.

Maven itself is also showing its age (its 1.0 release was 2004). I won't say that most of the industry has moved to Gradle, because the truth is so many workflows and projects are using Maven that it will be around for a long time. The good thing is that other build tools like Gradle, SBT etc. interop with maven the package repo just fine.

There is nothing stopping you from developing Java in vim. Syntastic and other plugins will help though.

For your web apps / services / APIs, check Dropwizard, it is not what I would call "bleeding edge", but it provides a reasonable base and has always allowed me to easily work with the rest of the awesome JVM ecosystem. My Dropwizard projects are usually cruft/magic free, start in less than 5 seconds, consume predictable resources and is easy to reason about, troubleshoot and improve.

I used to be a big fan of Spring(-boot) with MVC, but since I tried Dropwizard I never looked back. I'd still do Spring but perhaps for non-mvc/web needs.

The answer you are looking for is called "Clojure".

It’s the first time I see someone willing to trade Nexus/Maven for NPM. There’s even no standard way to build and package a TypeScript library, to start with. For small projects, maybe, it can work, but for enterprise needs JS/TS is not even close.