I’ve constantly fought Gradle for as long as I’ve been writing Java. I remember when I first started writing Java, I didn’t actually use a build tool (just the built in builder in Eclipse).As I’ve gotten into the Java world professionally, which means writing more tests, I’ve realized how god awful Gradle is with it’s convoluted plugins that have a needle-in-a-haystack like feel to it.
I’m confident Gradle has it’s place in the world; those organizations who need complicated build processes. The problem is, every code base I’ve ever worked on could be built by a much simpler tool.
This is why I built Espresso. Espresso is a build tool for Java (written in Rust) that focuses on simplicity, speed, repeatability and ease of configuration. It’s still a huge work in progress (and served as a project for me to finally learn some Rust). Features like including dependencies into the built .jar are missing (although you can fetch them from the Espresso Registry). Espresso is inspired by Cargo and Go.
