What is wrong with Java's tooling?
- The community leans a lot on configuration over code, and that's annoying. Sometimes, a hardcoded string in your conf could have been a hardcoded string directly in the code.
- Sometimes, dependency injection systems are so abstract that knowing which class is depended on in a specific runtime instance becomes a pain in the ass.
- Your idea just won't load class x, the obvious "clean cache" doesn't work as advertised, and you're back to stack overflow to know which couple of file you need to get rid of. That stuff happens just often enough for you to have a lingering feeling of annoyance, but not often enough for you to remember the exact files.
- Sure, idea is great. But in <other language> I was fine with just vim. The LSP was a great help, not a lifesaver.
- Unit testing is great. Annotations are great. Don't you enjoy that unit test class with a dozen annotations spanning 20 lines just above?
- Hibernate. Spring too, while we're at it. Not sure whether you consider this one squarely fits the tooling box.
Seriously though, the hours spent fighting dependency injection and Hibernate issues alone, when working on a really big Java project, could've been a full-time job.
For maximum fun, I once worked on a large ERP system that started out as a Struts 2/Hibernate 3/Jetty project and had an entire Rails app bolted on using JRuby. Some of the stuff in the JRuby side was injected thru Spring. ActiveRecord had to talk through Hibernate.
But I don't think it's necessarily about the tooling.
And yes, Hibernate is just horrible.
The number of times I actually needed to clean my cache I could probably count on one hand over the last 10 years.
Seriously though what's a decent Java build tool? Hacking on Gradle means having to learn another PL entirely. Maven?
Then say I want to publish a library for others to use from their own java project, how do I do that? I've never actually done it, but that page
https://maven.apache.org/repository/guide-central-repository...
seems awfully complicated compared to say
https://doc.rust-lang.org/cargo/reference/publishing.html
or even the pip equivalent.
Granted, working on a well set up java project is nice, but the setup process is not simple.
The latter gives us a "config" that's subject to Rice's theorem: it's essentially opaque, with no way of knowing what it will do other than executing it. An example I ran into at work: there's no way to list the dependencies of an SBT project (in order to set up an offline sandbox, in our case for reproducible building with Nix). SBT provides commands which claim to do that, but config files often append dependencies based on arbitrary logic; e.g. we had some like "when running unit tests, add this mocking plugin"; since "list dependencies" doesn't run the unit tests, that plugin dependency was missing from the sandbox.
I can't speak to the "publishing" situation for Java, I don't have any experience with it. All of our projects transparently pushed/pulled via a Nix cache, whether we used Java, Scala, Python, NodeJS, etc.
Well, the same is true for Maven. I know because I've tried. Plugins can download arbitrary dependencies at execution time.
That's where the point about Rice's theorem falls apart: it applies as much to maven as to Gradle because maven plugins can do whatever they want.
I've written a couple of Maven plugins and you must declare your dependencies explicitely even for those. Pulling in stuff dynamically would be possible but not very clever.
The same approach can be used when depending on third-party jars/plugins which don't fully specify their dependencies: just add the missing ones as extra dependencies of our project. (This happens a lot, where projects have undeclared dependencies on some commonly-used library, and don't notice since it's usually available in a well-stocked ~/.maven2 cache)
I am used to classpath problems with surefire but that it downloads undeclared stuff is new to me. Afair it pulls only in transitive dependencies. Could you give an example?
I am mainly building war files and it turned out to be good practice to explicitely declare any ambigous transitive dependencies. There's even a Maven plugin which shows up classes with different hash during build, https://basepom.github.io/dependency-versions-check-maven-pl...
Gradles own docs say "Well-designed build scripts consist mostly of declarative configuration rather than imperative logic".
When it's up to the programmer to make a script declarative, it's not a declarative language.
https://docs.github.com/en/actions/publishing-packages/publi...
The steps are roughly: 1. Configure the repository you want to push to. 2. Set up your account with the repository. 3. Configure your credentials. 4. Deploy.
What is acceptable?
P.S. For easier publishing, use a different repo e.g. Artifactory instead of Maven Central.
Dependency injection and annotation-driven development is “magic happens here” that is hard to analyze when something doesn’t work, and hard to reason about in the sense of building a proof that it will always behave in the correct and intended way.
I don't quite get the criticism against annotations. Metaprogramming and code as data seem to get a lot of love in the context of lisp, python or ruby, but a lot of hate when it happens to be done in Java. I absolutely love the powers that reflection, annotations etc give me.
The difficulty of analyzing dependency injection and "magic happens here" is overstated. Just run the code in the debugger. And if you are having problems with the auto-configuration stuff, you can always selectively disable it and explicitly define the beans you need.
How do you set a breakpoint on an annotation? You can’t, and that’s the issue. You can’t reason about annotations in the precise way you can reason about library calls.
You can set a breakpoint on your normal method and you can see if any proxy object was introduced by the annotation in the call stack and set a breakpoint there. You can also just see the usages of the annotation to see where and how it is being used and set a breakpoint there.
Anyway, going back to my original question, similar criticism is equally valid when you do metaprogramming in lisp/python/ruby. Why are these concerns only raised in the context of Java?