Support for non-gem targets

[cburgmer]

We are building an application with jars as dependencies.

We like jbundler's approach to define deps via Jarfile. We like jar-dependencies support for packaging up all the required deps for a final artefact.

It looks like currently we are forced to decide between either, is that correct? What's the best approach for an artefact that's not a gem?

[mkristian]

not sure I understand the question. both jbundler and jar-dependencies can have the exact same Jarfile but they produce slightly different lock files: Jarfile.lock and Jars.lock.

yes, jar-dependencies does also deal with declaring dependencies to jar library inside the gemspec but the lock_jars commandline is similar to jbundle commandline.

[cburgmer]

Let me try to clarify:

When looking at the jar-dependencies README, it states

jar dependencies are declared in the gemspec of the gem

which we took as being designed for Gems only. We don't have a gemspec.

In addition, if I understand correctly, jar-dependencies workflow is different to the one in jbundler. I haven't figured out yet how to make it install deps from the README, but when it comes to vendoring, I need to create a rake task to do the job.

For us, we are currently happily using jbundler install for development and jbundler install -vendor for packaging towards deployment. We have a simple Jarfile and a settings.xml in the project dir. Is that not good setup for the future?

[mkristian]

yes the README is just talking about gems.

the Jarfile and settings.xml are the same for jbundle install and lock_jars. the only difference is that `lockjars comes with jar-dependenies and jar-dependencies is a default gem with JRuby.

but if you are happy with jbundler as it is then there is no need to change things. I take from this conversation that I have to add this non-gem features to readme.

[headius]

It would be nice if we could merge all of these things into one but I appreciate the clarification. I struggled a bit today to try to use jar-dependencies without a gem or gem spec and eventually just gave up and require the jars out of my Maven repository directly. Unifying all these different ways of managing jar artifacts from Maven would make things a lot simpler.

As the JRuby team is taking over maintenance of this project, I'm guessing I'll probably be the one doing that work. Help wanted 🙂