I guess, first things first. Is there even such a thing (these days) as .jar file that I can include into my project and use the Otel APIs or is that a thing of the past and it is done completely different these days?

The only thing I could find was on the github page to pull the OTel source down and attempt to compile it with gradle. I don’t know anything about gradle/kotlin and all that other stuff, so I had to learn it as I went.

When I did the gradle build, it took 40 minutes and pulled what appeared to be half of the internet with it to build lots of “things”, followed by failure.

Needless to say, I’m a little confused with this whole process when I’m trying to create a super-duper-ultra-simple java program that uses the Otel api (and just play and build off of it). The “simple examples” offered by the Otel website are the equivalent of requiring me to be as good as Eddie Van Halen on guitar in order to start beginning guitar lessons. I’m not looking for docker/spring boot and so on, just a simple java hello world program. Sorry, I’m just a little frustrated at the moment.

I watched tons of videos on youtube and udemy, read the documentation, tried the “samples”, sort of understood them, but not really, then I just started looking for a OTel jar file that I could just import and play with only to find out I had to build it (?) and learn several frameworks during the process.