Hacker News Reader

Comment by fian | Hacker News Reader

Guess I'm nobody. I created a simple Swing (desktop) app in Java a couple of weeks ago. The process was something like:

Create new Java project in IDE Add no dependencies Use the built in IDE tooling to create a runnable JAR and tick the box to export the Ant build to a build.xml file.

Why would I want to complicate things by adding Maven/Gradle to the mix?

View on HN

I will give you the secret trick of senior developers: don't be the one who manages the build process, otherwise leave the project asap.

And I will also give you the secret trick of superninja senior developpers: be the one who manages the build process, so you will never EVER be fired.

The complexity of maven is well understood and battle tested. The complexity of a custom build is not. In my opinion it is of a far more concerning sort of complexity.

It's an Ant build file - nothing complex at all. If you no or few dependencies and are comfortable managing them manually, Ant is fine.

Non-networked applications don't tend to need to be so paranoid about keeping up to date with the latest versions of dependencies.

We're probably optimizing for different things. I'm normally optimizing for easy onboarding of someone new. If this is a personal project with few dependencies then ant is probably good enough.

And what if you want/need to add dependencies? A lot of them.

Sure _then_ you might opt to use Maven or Gradle.

My point is there are a wide variety of application types out there, not everything is a web application, not everything needs to use a complex build and dependency management system.

Yeah, but if you do know Maven, it scales down to small projects. The configuration for a simple project is trivial.

So just use Maven and save anyone coming after you a bunch of trouble when they have to extend your project ;-)

This method is useless for most projects, so yes, you are nobody.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com