It's about time to simplify things (in the java universe & enterprise) and this is a good first effort, all the best!
I don't find Java tooling at all difficult, compared to say Python or JavaScript.. but then again I've been using it for quite a while now so I may not be the best judge
Certainly those projects are solid, but I think there is a lot of room for improvement, and that's what I'm working on.
This goes way beyond that; a whole set of dependencies that are very thoughtfully designed. If they maintain backwards compatibility, as the JDK stdlib does, for essentially ever, I might bite. I've seen a lot of these type of things come and go.
Some of the projects are actually forks from some of my open source from the company I founded (and later sold). Some have been around for quite a while (10+ years) and have some adoption as well.
To keep those projects going, I forked them and started Latte.
My plan is to keep working on all the projects and really start promoting it. I think it's a game changer for Java.
I'm currently working on adding HTTP/2 to our HTTP server. It's nearly done and looking really solid. And our benchmarks on it are looking like we'll be the second fastest HTTP server for Java.
They all have dependency management, versioning, publishing, repository management, HTTP, web frameworks, and build tools as one complete ecosystem.
Latte's core systems are also battle tested (http, cli, jwt). They are forked from projects I built for FusionAuth, which supports around a billion users and has millions of downloads and tens of thousands of production deployments.
That's the company I founded. I wrote most of the tools, frameworks, and libraries it uses.
The dependency management system is part of the `cli` tool. And the repository management is the `app` project and published to https://app.lattejava.org.
The `cli` tool is the foundation though. It's how projects start, build, run, release, and publish.
Hope that helps clarify things.
My biggest gripe with Java has always been the tooling ecosystem, almost every java engineer I know solves this with the attitude of "just use intellij".
No. I won't, I refuse to use that, and I refuse to give a company money just to use a language as efficiently as other languages.
I am very happy to see that there's progress being made here. I wish you the best of luck!