Nicolas Fränkel, a Java and Kotlin developer, writes about the JVM, Spring Boot, Kubernetes, build tools, and testing.
HN commenters link it for his Gradle vs. Maven take, a Clojure series, and a post on using Spring without annotations.
> Case in point: The length of the README in this "Modern gradle" reference repo - that's a lot of complexity just to get dependencies, compilation, tests, and packaging. I prefer to copy-pasta some XML fragments and move on to solving the high ROI business-value issues.
The repo is a reference Gradle and Maven repo. The author, in his linked opinion piece, agrees with you:
> Gradle brought the two above great features that Maven integrated, proving that competition is good. Despite this, I still find no benefit of Gradle.
It looks like most people commenting here, would be better off reading that article and commenting. I would (like another commenter) like to see a comparison to bazel as well - and maybe a discussion of how/if Maven could be reasonably used with Kotlin/android...
https://blog.frankel.ch/final-take-gradle/
Indeed, JARs are just ZIP files (and can even be uncompressed), so this trick works to make self-executable JAR files that consist of a shell script concatenated with the actual JAR.
https://blog.frankel.ch/creating-self-contained-executable-jars/
https://coderwall.com/p/ssuaxa/how-to-make-a-jar-file-linux-executable
There are ways of writing Spring without annotations (or XML config): https://blog.frankel.ch/annotation-free-spring/
Granted, they may not be used much, but if you have an existing application it's probably easier to migrate away from the annotations than to switch to a different framework altogether.
Probably a reference to Clojure's arrow operator:
https://blog.frankel.ch/learning-clojure/2/
Something like a(b(c(d(e(7)))))) in Javascript could be written (-> 7 e d c b a) in Clojure?
https://blog.frankel.ch/ aka a Java Geek
Mainly Java as I was a Java developer when I started
Now a lot of Kotlin, Spring Boot, Kubernetes, Testing, ...
Interestingly, the README's author seems to agree with you, at least in part[1].
[1] https://blog.frankel.ch/final-take-gradle/