Fair enough about having to install a JVM separately. In my experience, it isn't a huge deal, but it's certainly a nonzero-sized deal.

But the classpath and jars? Write your application, 'gradle distZip', copy zip to target and unzip, invoke the launch script Gradle generated, done.

And if you can't be bothered to unzip, there's: https://github.com/pivotal/executable-dist-plugin