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Jules
Jules

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The Right Way vs. the Easy Right Way

360 No Gradle

I've always leant towards doing things the 'right' way even if it's slightly harder than doing it the easy way, so imagine my joy when I'm assigned a Java project without the use of an IDE or package managers.

How's that working out?

Nothing's working and I don't know why.

Will you ever do it again?

Probably not.

What about Java itself?

It's early to say, but the language differences don't seem as big as the general project management differences (when compared to Ruby or JavaScript).

Notes for anyone trying the same thing

Look up setting CLASSPATH to .jar files (for junit and hamcrest)

Wrap it up

What I've picked-up here is that the barrier to entry for test-driving Java programs is much higher when done the hard way. If IntelliJ or Gradle/Maven cuts any of that out in the future (and according the web results, things always 'just work' when using those tools) then I can mark that experiment as done and move on.

Top comments (0)

Great read:

Is it Time to go Back to the Monolith?

History repeats itself. Everything old is new again and I’ve been around long enough to see ideas discarded, rediscovered and return triumphantly to overtake the fad. In recent years SQL has made a tremendous comeback from the dead. We love relational databases all over again. I think the Monolith will have its space odyssey moment again. Microservices and serverless are trends pushed by the cloud vendors, designed to sell us more cloud computing resources.

Microservices make very little sense financially for most use cases. Yes, they can ramp down. But when they scale up, they pay the costs in dividends. The increased observability costs alone line the pockets of the “big cloud” vendors.