Maybe I just found an answer to my long standing need for an adequate build system for Java projects. On my web search for build systems I do every month in the hope that I can avoid to (continue to) develop my own one, one week ago I found a new tiny star on the build system heaven (or should I say hell): Quokka. A pretty fresh project developed by only on person, Andrew O'Malley. My first lock on it looks very promising. The project statement says it very clear:

"Quokka is a software build system, focusing on reproducible, modular builds with fine-grained dependency management."

It's focus is to be an alternative to Maven und therefore it supports almost the same directory layout for a single project. It comes with a very good User Guide and takes transitive dependency management somewhat more serious than Maven does.

My first attempt to play with a simple Java project went well and I only found one design issue I would change (The way project files and jars are mixed in remote repositories, which prevents the possibility to provide project descriptions for download restricted jars like those of Sun).

Unfortunatelly, my time to try it out on a somewhat greater multi project setup including AspectJ and OSGi projects is limited, but I am looking forward to play with it in a greater style. Maybe, I can suspend my work on Jackage (which is currently slowed down for personal reasons).