build.java

Warning

This project is not in a production-ready state yet! It's in design phase, and API its subject to substial change for now!

Because java build tools does not have to be miserable

Building this project

./build.sh

Usage this build system (or future usage, we are getting there)

1. Download and install this build system

2. Create a Build.java inside your project

import build.java.Builder;

void build(Builder b) {
    var ws = b.makeWorkspace("my-project");
    ws.dependOn("com.googlecode.json-simple:json-simple:1.1.1")
    ws.addTree("src/"); // will add your .java files for compilation, and will bundle your resources
)}

Thanks to java 21, you don't need to declare a class, and all the boilerplate to have a main method.

3. Run the build-java command

build-java uberjar // or just jar if you prefer to not bundle your deps inside the jar

And done! Now you can run java -jar ./my-project.jar, build.java already automatcly setup your main class;

Main objectives of this project

• Compile and package it fast (unlike gradle);
• I know java, i like to program in java, not xml (looking at you ant/maven);
• Make it easy to extend the build, easy to bake file and doing custom steps (the complete oposite of maven).
• A usable report for unit tests in the terminal (i dont know why this one is hard, both gradle and maven are very sucky at this unless you spend a good amount of time configurating custom reporters)
• Provide a good user experiance for java developers, even for the ones that are afraid of the terminal

Roadmap / goals

• basic build with maven like file tree
• download maven dependencies
  • Parallel download of pom and artifacts? (maven only does artifacts, pom are downloaded in a serial manner)
• a doc command that compile all the javadoc of the dependencies and servers them locally, kinda like cargo doc from rust
• A test command that runs junit tests and print the surfire report in a nice way
• Multi module project support
• Pom.xml generation (sadly we need it for publishing libraries)
• Provide example and facility building JNI based libraries
• Lock file?

Main inspirations for this project:

• Clojure's tools.build
• Zig build system
• The Jai programing language
• nob.h - NoBuild