picocli VS jbang

Picocli allows using a compiler annotation processor to generate classes at compile time instead [0].

[0]: https://github.com/remkop/picocli/blob/main/picocli-codegen/...

Picocli is a pretty good one for writing CLI apps

"and there are simply no good command line input parsing libraries for Java."

Looks like author missed the most obvious and popular OSS one: https://picocli.info/

The command line example gave me the "ick". It is usually preferrable to parse the command line arguments into one instance of a custom "command class", rather than into a list of things. Like jcommander, picocli or jbock do.

Complex argument parsing needs to be auto-generated by libraries like picocli. Even if you need something custom, it'd be quicker to write an Annotation processor from scratch than editing that file.

https://github.com/remkop/picocli

"Picocli-based applications can be ahead-of-time compiled to a GraalVM native image, with extremely fast startup time and lower memory requirements, which can be distributed as a single executable file."

https://picocli.info/quick-guide.html

Using picocli to handle your command line options gives you the best chance to automatically generate an ArgumentCompleter script in the future, but won't help you today (other than possibly making your command line handling more standardized & easier).

Picocli

Then we released a JBang! and picocli based cli that would be, on any OS running a jvm runtime :

picocli : "a mighty tiny command line interface"

Its library made by maven folks that allows easy embedding of the resolver. Im about to move it it in jbang https://github.com/jbangdev/jbang/pull/1604

Congratulations. I believe there is room for a micro framework that is smaller than Javalin or SparkJava.

That said, if you want to cash even more on minimalism, you may want to provide a single-file example using JBang[0].

[0]. https://jbang.dev/

These would be awesome changes and fully in the spirit of what we managed to do already in jbang (https://jbang.dev). Having the verbosity removed would make it even better.

big part of why I made jbang.dev so if you want to quickly play with all the suggested technologies in this thread without being a java build tool master do give it a go.

(jbang being https://jbang.dev)

Quarkus provides the option to create command line apps, and this is so kool, since you can also compile these into native. We are just going to make simple app for demo purpose in this blog. But if you are looking into creating some serious nirvana of cli apps take a look at this guide at quarkus.io using picocli or JBang

https://jbang.dev provides a bunch of ways to build and distribute simple java apps.

See https://twitter.com/maxandersen/status/1494600204590501889?s=20 and release at https://github.com/jbangdev/jbang/releases/tag/v0.90.0

~$ sudo apt -q install zip ~$ curl -s "https://get.sdkman.io" | bash ~$ source "$HOME/.sdkman/bin/sdkman-init.sh" ~$ sdk version ~$ ==== BROADCAST ================================================================= * 2022-01-06: connor 1.2.1 available on SDKMAN! https://github.com/helpermethod/connor/releases/tag/v1.2.1 * 2022-01-04: micronaut 3.2.4 available on SDKMAN! * 2022-01-02: jbang 0.86.0 available on SDKMAN! https://github.com/jbangdev/jbang/releases/tag/v0.86.0 ================================================================================ SDKMAN 5.13.1 ~$