Build Tools

The two popular build tools in the Java ecosystem are Maven and Gradle. Rust has Cargo (cargo), which is both a build tool and a package manager.

As an example, to compile/build a project using Maven you would use mvn compile. The equivalent in Rust using cargo would be cargo build.

Building

To build an executable for a Java project, you can use mvn package, which will compile the project sources into a single executable jar file. The jar file can typically be run on any platform that has JVM installed. cargo build in Rust does the same, except the Rust compiler statically links (although there exist other linking options) all code into a single, platform-dependent, binary.

In Java, you can use a tool like GraalVM to create a native binary executable, similar to what Rust does with cargo build.

See also:

• Crate

Dependencies

In Java, the contents of the pom.xml file define the build options and project dependencies. In Rust, when using Cargo, a Cargo.toml declares the dependencies for a package.

A typical pom.xml file would look like:

<project>

  <groupId>com.example</groupId>
  <artifactId>simplerestapi</artifactId>
  <version>0.0.1-SNAPSHOT</version>
  <name>rest-api-demo</name>
  <description>Simple REST API demo project</description>

  <properties>
    <java.version>21</java.version>
  </properties>

  <dependencies>

    <dependency>
      <groupId>org.postgresql</groupId>
      <artifactId>postgresql</artifactId>
      <version>42.7.3</version>
    </dependency>
    ...

  </dependencies>


  <build>
    ....
  </build>

</project>

The equivalent Cargo.toml in Rust is defined as:

[package]
name = "rest-api-demo"
version = "0.1.0"
description = "Simple REST API demo project"

[dependencies]
tokio = "1.0.0"

Cargo follows a convention that src/main.rs is the crate root of a binary crate with the same name as the package. Likewise, Cargo knows that if the package directory contains src/lib.rs, the package contains a library crate with the same name as the package.

Package registries

The most common package registry for Java is the Maven Central repository, whereas Rust packages are usually shared via crates.io.