JBang @ hack-commit-push 2021

[maxandersen]

Hack.commit.push May 29th 2021

On May 29th hack-commit-push happens. A day of hacking on and with opens source projects. Open for all and this page is to capture idea/comments for JBang projects participation.

What is JBang

JBang unleashes the power of Java. No setup needed - just code and run with zero to minimal setup. JBang can be used from small scripts to full blown microservices or even JavaFX applications written in Java.

No maven, no gradle not even a install of a JDK nor editor is required to get started. JBang will set it up if you need it.

It lets you get started easily with java running jbang init helloworld, you can run the script jbang helloworld and if you need dependencies you just add //DEPS lines listing the maven coordinates.

With jbang you can run .java and .jsh (jshell) based files; they can be files locally on disk, Maven coordinates or even aliases defined in a jbang-catalog.json again locally or remotely on source hosting sites such as github, gitlab or bitbucket.

In short jbang lets you run and create java code big or small wherever and from where ever your code is.

What happens behind the scenes

jbang is a small wrapper script written in bash and Windows batch that calls into a jbang.jar which manages the interaction with tools from the JDK like javac, java and jar to simplify the workflow. The java code in jbang takes the scripts inputs, does a build using javac if necessary, caches the output and then generates a java or jshell command line that the wrapper script will execute.

This means that once the java app is running jbang is no longer running. jbang thus is completely independent and that way it can work with any Java version or possibly in the future any language, especially jvm based ones.

Videos

• 🎥 Super short intro to JBang
• 🎥 Latest JBang presentation

Setup development

Minimal setup is as follows:

git clone https://github.com/jbangdev/jbang
cd jbang
gradle spotlessApply build installDist

You now run jbang using build/install/jbang/bin/jbang or just add build/install/jbang/bin to your PATH and run jbang directly.

You should be able to use any Java capable IDE like IntelliJ, Eclipse, vscode or similar to develop on JBang.

Ideas

Good First Issues

Issues marked with 'good first issue'

"App store"

Improve / add to "JBang Catalog" in this PR. Idea is to automatically catalog and index jbang-catalog's on i.e. GitHub and make that searchable for easy lookup.

Add jbang-catalog to your favourite java application

Setup a implicit alias catalog by adding a jbang-catalog.json to your favourite java application so they can be run with jbang out of the box.

i.e. jbang gavsearch@jbangdev is possible because of https://github.com/jbangdev/jbang-catalog.

Example for sqlline: julianhyde/sqlline#430

Create your own awesome jbang script that does something useful

Create a script that does something useful and publish it in your github jbang-catalog repository.

Other ideas

Add your ideas in this discussion thread.