Are we heading for jar hell in java platform similar to dll hell?

Question

Last night I was trying to put a simple tutorial to build an application using the stack - Spring (2.5) + JPA (1.0) + Hibernate (downloading for first time, so didn't know which version to use). Unfortunately I didnt want to use Maven as the target participants were on ANT build. As usual hit the search engine and got somehow the steps in the appcontext, persistence.xml and in the java classes. The moment I started getting required libraries, I lost in the JAR hell. Luckily, not much of a problem on the Spring side as all the dependent JARs are packaged together for my Spring 2.5.6.

When it came to hibernate, I had no clue which all Jars to be included on the first place. On the next challenge, didn't know which version for each to add.

Finally I got the whole thing working, but it looks so scary to enter this JAR hell again unless I am taken through Maven heaven.

With lots of interceptors and weaving, it is becoming more complicated for the conventional Java programmer who once liked Java primarily for lots of transparency on what my code is doing.

Am I right in the thought process?

Answer 1

You can still have dependency management while using Ant, use Ivy. See a detailed tutorial here for more or less exactly the stack you want to use. (Doesn't include Hibernate but I guess you can find how to add that pretty quickly)

And one more thing, if you are referring to the spring.jar which has the full Spring 2.5.6 bundle, I strongly suggest not to use it, you probably need not more than 20% of the libraries included in it. (Take the time to discover exactly which libraries you do need and only pick those.)

Also, consider using Spring 3 if you can, as well as Hibernate, if you are free to pick a version, I'd go for the latest.

Answer 2

I had used other JPA implementations before, but I used Hibernate for the first time this year. Certainly it is more complicated than others in terms of jar dependencies, but in the Getting Started Guide, in Chapter 1, under Obtaining Hibernate I found details on which jars I needed and why.

I did suffer of jar hell problems later on, not because of not knowing which jars to use, but because we are in a really big probject, and other subprojects were already using older versions of Hibernate classes, and this caused me a lot of trouble at runtime and it took me several days to diagnose and fix.

I think this is a reality for the time being, and tools like Maven or frameworks like OSGi attempt to alleviate the problem.

Perhaps the biggest hope we have is Project Jigsaw intended to be part of JDK 8 in the future and which attempts to solve the Java modularity problems we currently have. It will be like a OSGi with steroids, and built in the JDK itself.

But before that happens, all I can tell you is a famous quote by Wiston Churchill

If you are going through hell, keep going