Nix has composable, reusable, and shareable functions. Nix is a full, be awkward, programming language. You'll find functions and flakes for nearly everything you might want to do. An example of one that is more plugin like is sops-nix.
Though have never used maven or maven plugins, I may be missing your overall point.
Want a packaged spring boot application? There is a plugin for that. Want to package it in a container image? Just add a plugin dependency. Want to build an RPM or deb package? Add another two plugin dependencies. All various artifacts are going to be uploaded to a repository and made available as dependencies.
Missing a specific plugin? You can easily implement it in Java as a module and use it inside your project (and expose it as a standalone artifact as well).
I can’t find anything similar in Nix ecosystem.
Having a language allowing for this is not the same as having solutions already available.
For example, `dockerTools` provides different functions like creating an image and other things. There is a module of fetchers, functions that retrieve source files from GitHub and other sources.
But I don't think there are many language-specific functions, like the ones you are describing. I can't think of any, except for the ones that build a Nix package from a language-specific package.
or
https://github.com/nix-community/flakelight
Their aim is to create an ecosystem of reusable Nix libraries. But it is tiny.
Writing a Maven plugin (ie. a reusable piece of configuration management logic) is easy because you can use any library from the vast Java ecosystem (just add a library as a dependency of your plugin).
Doing the same in Nix requires recreating these libraries in Nix.
Looks like Maven might simply be the right choice...
And don't get me wrong - I know it _can_ be done in Nix (as it is a programming language) - the question is _how easy_ it is to create/maintain it.
Let's say my solution requires a Java Spring Boot application, React client, custom Postgres extension and Python ML code.
- Java stuff
- node and npm
- I don't know what you would need for Postgres extensions
- Python, pip or poetry (or whatever you use for Python package management)
Here is an example flake: https://bpa.st/ZUQQ
Under `devShells`, you have `packages`. You can put there any package from nixpkgs, not just Python packages like I have there.
To make it cleaner, you could have a variable for each platform and concatenate them under packages like
`packages = javaPkgs ++ nodePkgs ++ pgPkgs ++ pyPkgs`.