CLI evaluation

[lppedd]

Hi everyone!
In the last week I've spent a lot of time evaluating frameworks with CLI capabilities.
I'd like to summarize here my current understanding of the JVM ecosystem and why I did not chose Spring Shell.

• Which frameworks did I evaluate?

  • Micronaut (Picocli)
  • Quarkus (Picocli)
  • Spring Shell

• What was I looking for?

  • easy development workflow.
    I'm developing a command, I want to press a button in the IDE and debug it (with an active context) ❌
  • easy testing, with an out-of-the-box testing framework for the CLI ❌
  • small native size (in GraalVM terms obviously) ❌

  Bonus:

  • out-of-the-box interactive shell capability ✔️
  • multi-step command flow ✔️🆘

• What did I pick in the end?
  Quarkus

• Why?

  • built-in UPX compression step
  • faster native image start-up
  • cool command testing tools (@Launch annotation, LaunchResult parameter)

  Spring Shell related:

  • the command flow is awesome, but it's mostly broken on Windows. I found myself getting mad at the prompt when typing.
    Also, it doesn't work when starting the application through an IntelliJ IDEA (Ultimate) run configuration.
  • the command as method is a nice idea, but it's impractical with a lot of parameters, each with its own annotation spawning multiple lines
  • the documentation is still a bit a lacking.
    For Quarkus and Micronaut I can just navigate to the Picocli guide and that's it, as the framework layer is small.
    For Spring Shell I found myself looking at random blog posts or StackOverflow questions

All in all, you are doing an amazing job here, and I think I'll switch to Spring Shell in the future.
I'd just like to see more love for Windows (like, I inited a project, built the JAR straight away, and got an exception running it) and testing.

I'll keep this issue updated as I progress with my CLI project capabilities.

[jvalkeal]

Thanks a lot for a constructive feedback as it helps to make things better. I'm moving this into discussions as it's easier there to have further threaded "chats".