Simon Fell > Its just code > JAR hell

Tuesday, April 4, 2006

<vent> I've been through DLL hell on numerous occasions, but frankly it's nothing compared to JAR and dependency hell I seem to go through every time I look at a Java framework. I've been looking at one tonight (doesn't matter which), the download includes a /lib with 35 jars in, on top of the 11 jars that actually make up what I wanted to look at. In addition building the samples (basically a WSDL2Java code generator with a class that uses it) requires maven, which proceeded to download god knows how many more jars, then got stuck on some that can't be redisted by maven itself, gives instructions on how to manually install those jars into maven. Just to cap it off, those instructions don't actually work!. So, I've blown 3 or 4 hours trying to get a simple hello world sample running and failed miserably. Does it really have to be this hard ? I knew I should of started in on the python based project I'd got in mind.</vent>