Outline

Outline is a Java-annotation based command line argument parser loosely based on https://github.com/airlift/airline.

The need for Outline arose as the development of airline is mostly stalled - no new commits, bug-fixes, or pull-request merges have been made. I tried to use to fix the same in a fork of mine - but then its very hard dependency on Google Guava made me realize that we could simplify the framework. airline is dependent a lot on immutables and thus, copies a lot of data between data-structures which bloats the code to understand.

Thus, began my journey for Outline with an aim to simplify the framework and yet be more-powerful than airline.

The codebase is now sane and it can be used to parse almost all Git-like command-structures. Some examples are listed below.

Tasks left

• Show argument usage examples in help
• Show arguments usage examples in help

TODO

Following items are still need to be implemented to attain feature parity with airline:

• Generate help guides
• Allow collecting all available commands using reflection
• support for system properties
• support for reading configuration from file
• resolve conflicting names of commands across groups

Features

Outline supports all features that are supported in airline and more as:

• Support for splitting end arguments based on index into individual attributes
• Ability to define command groups using annotation

Common feature set:

• Annotation based definition of commands, options and arguments
• Meta-data driven

Usage Examples

Downloads

For now you may use jitpack.io to download snapshots of the framework:

Add the following repository to Maven,

<repository>
    <id>jitpack.io</id>
    <url>https://jitpack.io</url>
</repository>

Then add the dependency as,

<dependency>
    <groupId>com.github.sangupta</groupId>
    <artifactId>outline</artifactId>
    <version>-SNAPSHOT</version>
</dependency>

Versioning

For transparency and insight into our release cycle, and for striving to maintain backward compatibility, Outline will be maintained under the Semantic Versioning guidelines as much as possible.

Releases will be numbered with the follow format:

<major>.<minor>.<patch>

And constructed with the following guidelines:

• Breaking backward compatibility bumps the major
• New additions without breaking backward compatibility bumps the minor
• Bug fixes and misc changes bump the patch

For more information on SemVer, please visit http://semver.org/.

License

outline - command line argument parser
Copyright (c) 2015-2016, Sandeep Gupta

http://sangupta.com/projects/outline

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
You may obtain a copy of the License at

    http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
limitations under the License.