Micro-Rant: Java Build Systems

Ant is Make in XML.

Maven is an over-engineered, yet castrated build system. You can't do fundamental stuff (such as specifying which version of Java you want to use or moving files) without importing a plugin or calling Ant. Want to do something slightly different? Build you own plugin (this process is more painful than it sounds). On the plus side, Maven does have a handy (but not best-in-class) dependency system, which is why we still have to suffer it.

Gradle allows custom build tasks (finally!). It's also huge, bloated, and comes with a 70-chapters manual that still manages to be lacunary and confusing. Understanding Gradle is not the work of an afternoon but of weeks.

Scala is not served better. To think sbt once stood for "simple build tool" (now retconned to "scala build tool") is enough to choke on the irony.

One might as well build Java using Make, which is exactly when I'm doing for the moment.

Hope?

Kobalt is a sane build system for Kotlin & Java by Cedric Beust (the author of TestNG). However it's still in its infancy.

pluto is a prototype from academia (related paper) that enables incremental, minimal, and safe builds (no need to make clean). You can't really use it as is, but the idea only asks to be picked up.