1 Common Questions

In this section we will consider the simplest usage of nuts package manager.

or, "Why do we need a package manager for Java. Isn't Maven enough?".

Please read Nuts Introduction, Why and What for. In few words maven manages dependencies to build applications, nuts uses maven dependencies system to install applications.

What does Nuts mean and why ?

nuts stands for "Network Updatable Things Services". It helps managing things (artifacts of any type, not only java). The Name also helps depicting another idea : nuts is a good companion and complement to Maven tool. The word maven (MAY-vin), from Yiddish, means a super-enthusiastic expert/fan/connoisseur/Wizard. And where wizards are, fools and nuts must be.

nuts is the foolish tool to support the deployment and not the build. Hence the name.

Not only. nuts supports all types of packaging, particularly, those supported by maven. This includes pom , jar , maven-plugin , ejb , war , ear , rar.

nuts is also intended to support any "thing" including "exe" ,"dll", "so", "zip" files, etc.

nuts differs from maven as it defines other properties to the artifact descriptor (aka pom in maven) : os (operating system), arch (hardware architecture), osdist (relevant for linux for instance : opensuse, ubuntu) and platform (relevant to vm platforms like java vm, dotnet clr, etc). Such properties are queried to download the most appropriate binaries for the the current environment.

I hoped you would ask this question. Of course. You can drop me an email (see my github profile email) to add you as contributor or fork the repository and ping a pull request. You can also open a new issue for feature implementation to invite any other contributor to implement that feature (or even implement it your self).
Mainly all of the documentation can be found in 2 places:
  • this website: it includes both user documentation and javadocs (code documentation)
  • each command help option. when you type
 
  nuts --help
or 
 
  nsh --help
you will get more details on nuts or on the tool (here nsh)

nuts is published under Licensed under the GNU LESSER GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE, Version 3.

2 NAF Questions

In this section we will consider Nuts Application Framework related questions.

If by nuts aware you mean that you would download your application and run it using nuts, then you just need to create the application using maven and deploy your application to the public maven central. Nothing really special is to be done from your side. You do not have to use plugins like 'maven-assembly-plugin' and 'maven-shade-plugin' to include your dependencies. Or, you can also use NAF (nuts Application Framework) to make your application full featured "Nuts aware" application.

or, "Why should I consider implementing my terminal application using Nuts Application Framework (NAF)?" First of all, NAF is a simple 300k jar so for what it provided to you, you would be surprised. Indeed, implementing your application using NAF will provide you a clean way to :

  • seamless integration with nuts and all other NAF applications (obviously!)

  • support standard file system layout (XDG) where config files and log files are not necessarily in the same folder see Nuts File System for more details. support application life cycle events (onInstall, onUninstall, onUpdate),

  • standard support of command line arguments
  • dynamic dependency aware class loading
  • terminal coloring, and terminal components (progress bar, etc...)
  • json, yaml, xml, table, tree and plain format support out of the box as output to all your commands
  • pipe manipulation when calling sub processes
  • advanced io features (persistence Locks, monitored downloads, compression, file hashing....)
  • standard ways to support and use installed platforms (installed JRE, JDK, ...)
  • and lots more...
Sure, you will be able to benefit of all the items in the preceding question but terminal coloring wont be relevant of course. Check netbeans-launcher in github. It's a good example of how interesting is to use NAF in non terminal applications.