[osmosis-dev] Gradle Build Scripts

[Brett Henderson]

Hi Greg,

On 12 November 2012 03:24, Greg Troxel <gdt at ir.bbn.com> wrote:

>
> Does gradle require anything else (other than a JDK/JRE) in terms of
> dependencies?
>

No.  You just need a JDK 1.6 or higher.  It has less dependencies than the
Ant build because it requires Ant to be installed along with a number of
ant modules.  Gradle on the other hand will bootstrap itself using a
wrapper script included in the source tree.  You can however use a locally
installed gradle (invoked via gradle instead of ./gradlew) if you wish.


>
> If someone doesn't use eclipse, does using gradle become more awkward?
>

Gradle has no dependency on Eclipse.  It just helps configure your Eclipse
environment.  In the existing Ant build, the Eclipse project files are all
manually maintained and have to be manually kept in sync with the Ivy
dependencies.  This change means that you have to run a "gradle eclipse"
command before you can import the projects into Eclipse.


>
> Is Groovy implemented in java?  If not, what barriers does this raise
> (beyond the existing java-isn't-really-portable issues)?
>

Yes, it's a JVM-based language.  I've been running it on Windows, Mac and
Linux for a while now with no issues.


>
> Does this add a requirement to have a network connection to do builds?
>

It requires a network connection, however this was always the case.  The
existing Ant/Ivy build also requires a network connection.  It should be
possible to copy a gradle cache directory between machines in a similar
fashion to the current ivy cache if you wish to operate in disconnected
mode.

Note that Gradle uses Ivy internally anyway, so under the covers the Gradle
and Ant build have many similarities in how they retrieve dependencies.


>
> Does this whole scheme have enough mindshare that it is really clear
> that it will be staying around, rather than being a flash in the pan?
> (E.g., arch was a really interesting VCS, but it's gone.  It pretty
> clearly inspired others, but AFAIK no one uses it any more.)
>

I wouldn't call Gradle a flash in the pan.  It's been around for several
years now and is continuing to become more popular.  A number of
well-recognised projects use it now including Spring.  I've used in on a
couple of commercial projects now and have found it to work quite well.

Brett
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