jam-buds VS prepackaged

Interesting discussion here. I've been very happy with Gradle for my first major JVM project, a small Kotlin API with a simple build configuration (https://github.com/thomasboyt/jam-buds/blob/master/rhiannon/...). I suppose I'm not surprised to see more complaints from folks who have worked with it on much longer-lived and _much_ more complex projects.

I've been thinking of taking a peek into Java, which I have never really written, given that I haven't been very impressed with the "Kotlin-first" JVM libraries and frameworks I've seen, and I've been pretty annoyed by the JetBrains tooling lock-in Kotlin has (there is no major VSCode/VIM-ready language server for Kotlin, for example, unlike what Red Hat has been building using Eclipse's underpinnings for Java). Is the general thinking that, for something like a Spring Boot application, it's much better to just start with Maven? I'll admit I am, aesthetically, displeased with the mountains of XML config I've seen in some tutorial articles, but I imagine it's a lot simpler to maintain over time than any DSL would be.

Maven is great so long as there's a plugin to do what you need to do. If there isn't, it's quite possible that writing one will be simpler than trying to coax Maven into doing something unorthodox.

For example, here's an old plugin I put together to allow easy publishing of a third-party artefact to a repository that didn't have a web interface for such things: https://github.com/andrewaylett/prepackaged

It's old enough that the infrastructure I set up around it has bit-rotted -- I've just pushed a clone to GitHub to share here :). I'd hope using modern language features would make it easier still.