Hi! What would you suggest using to build a Kotlin project? My only requirement is to be able to use external libraries, like jOOQ, Postgres drivers etc… In Java-land almost every lib is available in Maven repository. Can I use libraries from Maven central using Kotlin command line tools? Or should I use Maven or Gradle? What do you use?

Maven or Gradle, or even Ant would work. You can also try #kobalt. Some people even use make.

Don't forget bazel

Or blaze?

I could use Make(file) with

kotlinc

, but how would I import a 3rd party lib from maven repository?

If you choose to use make, you will have to download it manually from Maven central, I suppose. Make doesn’t have package management capabilities.

My initial

pom.xml

is now 160 lines long. I am (slowly) getting sick of all that huge pom-spaghetti. Especially in a µservices environment when you have many little modules and each JVM one has hundreds of lines in poms… Gradle seems promising as far as I can see…

Are you using parent/child pom hierarchy? It saves a lot of repetitive text. Gradle is also good, especially with Kotlin scripting (#gradle)

36 lines of XML just to configure Liquibase… even more to configure jOOQ code generator. In Makefile it would be like 4 lines…

That probably wouldn’t be 4 lines, I think. But even doing reasonably good java compilation with Make would be huge work. Java has to compile the whole program, unlike C/C++. You can’t normally compile .java files one by one. So you will have to build up some sort of “gather all .java files for a module” logic, and then you will need to do it incrementally, etc, etc. Just use tools that are built for this kind of systems.

There are going to be no more than few

.kt

files, even one will work for now, but you are right, the build tool would be better.

Well, then probably a shell script is ok 🙂 Like https://github.com/holgerbrandl/kscript

This looks crazy, I will have to evaluate it before Gradle 🙂

@witoldsz Is your project on github or somewhere so I can take a look at your build file?

No, it's a commercial product, it has no one, single build file. The question of this topic was about a microservice, so it's like a tiny block of a bigger picture created of like > 40. I am evaluating Kotlin to be one of them.