Nicolas Fränkel
blog.frankel.ch · Personal blog · on HN since 2010
Nicolas Fränkel, a Java and Kotlin developer, writes about the JVM, Spring Boot, Kubernetes, build tools, and testing.
What HN saysHN commenters link it for his Gradle vs. Maven take, a Clojure series, and a post on using Spring without annotations.
54HN people shared it
7linked it in comments
281stories submitted
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Most-shared posts
- 1My final take on Gradle vs. Maven (2023)7 people · 8 points · first shared 2023 · discussion on HN
- 2Rise and fall of JVM languages3 people · 146 points · first shared 2017 · 229 comments on HN
- 3Leverage the richness of HTTP status codes3 people · 6 points · first shared 2023 · discussion on HN
- 4Discuss the Problem, Not the Solution3 people · 6 points · first shared 2022 · discussion on HN
- 5Back to basics: accessing Kubernetes pods3 people · 5 points · first shared 2022 · discussion on HN
- 6Learning by Doing: An HTTP API with Rust3 people · 3 points · first shared 2023 · discussion on HN
- 7In Defense of XML2 people · 137 points · first shared 2020 · 254 comments on HN
- 8First impressions about Graal VM2 people · 127 points · first shared 2018 · 40 comments on HN
- 9What I miss in Java, the perspective of a Kotlin developer2 people · 93 points · first shared 2022 · 118 comments on HN
- 10Using my new Raspberry Pi to run an existing GitHub Action2 people · 90 points · first shared 2024 · 31 comments on HN
- 11Inheritance and Subtyping2 people · 45 points · first shared 2025 · 49 comments on HN
- 12Your own Kubernetes controller – Laying out the work2 people · 12 points · first shared 2020 · 2 comments on HN
- 13Rust and the JVM2 people · 10 points · first shared 2021 · discussion on HN
- 14A hard look at the state of Java modularization2 people · 8 points · first shared 2019 · discussion on HN
- 15Error handling across different programming languages2 people · 7 points · first shared 2022 · discussion on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
e12e · 2024-01-05
> Case in point: The length of the README in this "Modern gradle" reference repo - that's a lot of complexity just to get dependencies, compilation, tests, and packaging. I prefer to copy-pasta some XML fragments and move on to solving the high ROI business-value issues.
The repo is a reference Gradle and Maven repo. The author, in his linked opinion piece, agrees with you:
> Gradle brought the two above great features that Maven integrated, proving that competition is good. Despite this, I still find no benefit of Gradle.
It looks like most people commenting here, would be better off reading that article and commenting. I would (like another commenter) like to see a comparison to bazel as well - and maybe a discussion of how/if Maven could be reasonably used with Kotlin/android...
https://blog.frankel.ch/final-take-gradle/
nfrankel · 2020-04-07
https://blog.frankel.ch/ aka a Java Geek
Mainly Java as I was a Java developer when I started
Now a lot of Kotlin, Spring Boot, Kubernetes, Testing, ...
amiga386 · 2025-08-21
Probably a reference to Clojure's arrow operator:
https://blog.frankel.ch/learning-clojure/2/
Something like a(b(c(d(e(7)))))) in Javascript could be written (-> 7 e d c b a) in Clojure?
taink · 2024-01-05
Interestingly, the README's author seems to agree with you, at least in part[1].
[1] https://blog.frankel.ch/final-take-gradle/
Tainnor · 2023-08-20
There are ways of writing Spring without annotations (or XML config): https://blog.frankel.ch/annotation-free-spring/
Granted, they may not be used much, but if you have an existing application it's probably easier to migrate away from the annotations than to switch to a different framework altogether.
titzer · 2022-07-26
Indeed, JARs are just ZIP files (and can even be uncompressed), so this trick works to make self-executable JAR files that consist of a shell script concatenated with the actual JAR.
https://blog.frankel.ch/creating-self-contained-executable-jars/
https://coderwall.com/p/ssuaxa/how-to-make-a-jar-file-linux-executable
sidcool · 2019-04-07
Direct link: https://blog.frankel.ch/creating-git-shortcuts/