Gradle First Look
I have put the Groovy based build system Gradle into use for a first project. The project is a deployable jar. This is intentionally the simplest form of project that you can build. I did not want to attempt anything larger given how difficult builds can be.
Gradle seems to have more in common with Maven than Ant. It has a more structured dependency management system than Ant using Ivy and it has a concept of plugins that implement packages of tasks that are designed to work together.
After a short time together, these are my thoughts:
Pros
Gradle seems to have more in common with Maven than Ant. It has a more structured dependency management system than Ant using Ivy and it has a concept of plugins that implement packages of tasks that are designed to work together.
After a short time together, these are my thoughts:
Pros
- Absolutely minimal configuration to get a build going
- Compact Groovy syntax for depency resolution
- Decent documentation
- Truly scriptable like Ant or early Maven (even though Jelly was a hideous thing)
- Big plans (let's hope they follow through)
- Error messages are pretty unclear at the moment.
- It doesn't yet feel 'intuitive' to use
- Young project and many of the built-ins in Maven are not there yet: Cobertura, PMD, etc...
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