Re: Important Changes to Trunk and Use of Ant & Gradle

[Michael Brohl]

I have no strong opinion for/against Gradle (I simply have no experience with it) but I agree that it should be either Ant or Gradle. Running two build tools in parallel would make it too complex an gain nothing.

I'm in favor for learning new things so Gradle sounds fine for me :-)

Regards,

Michael


Am 21.06.16 um 08:11 schrieb Taher Alkhateeb:

Hi Deepak,

Ant would be removed completely for the following reasons:

- First to resolve the ASF issue about the libraries mentioned by Sharan
below without expending effort on both build systems.
- Ant is an obstacle to refactoring the framework. If we keep both systems
side by side we gain nothing, actually we lose value because the builds
become more complex. For example, we will not be able to intrduce the unit
tests, and we will have two build outputs, and we will have two ways of
running the framework (java -jar ofbiz.jar and gradlew ofbiz) and we will
have other incompatibility issues.

With that being said, we will not make the switch before a thorough and
full testing. That is why we ask everyone who is willing to please help us
out to make this transition smooth by testing and providing feedback and
comments.

Taher Alkhateeb

On Tuesday, 21 June 2016, Deepak Dixit <deepak.di...@hotwaxsystems.com>
wrote:

+1 for Gradle.

Are we going to remove ant from framework completely or planning to keep
both ant and gradle?



Thanks & Regards
--
Deepak Dixit
www.hotwaxsystems.com

On Mon, Jun 20, 2016 at 6:20 PM, Sharan Foga <sharan.f...@gmail.com
<javascript:;>> wrote:

Hi Everyone

This is the second of two emails to inform the community about what has
been happening around how we are planning to handle external dependencies
in the trunk. Two weeks ago the community discussed and agreed to the use
of Gradle to help us put together a unit test framework. While trying to
get this set up while Ant remained as our build tool became very

difficult.

This was because our Ant scripts:

    - are massive and contain a lot of code
    - are complex
    - are very brittle and make it very hard to change things
    - have no dependency management
    - need everything to be declared

We realised very quickly that the re-factoring issues and limitations we
are facing are because of our build tool – Ant.

Ant is verbose so it needs everything to be declared. We did a brief
assessment of Maven and found it better than Ant but not a good fit for
OFBiz because it has strict requirements for the
convention-over-configuration rules to work. Instead we decided to take a
closer look at Gradle.

So why Gradle?
As Taher was already looking at Gradle for unit testing, we decided to
look at what we would need to do to totally replace Ant with Gradle. We
received some great support and feedback from David, who is already using
Gradle with Moqui.

After some preliminary tests we found that Gradle has some very good
features such as:

    - a much shorter code base (e.g. one single file of around 250 lines

of

code replaces all the build.xml files and thousands of lines of code)
    -  Programming is DSL based and links in well with Groovy (e.g. the
script is short because despite heavy custom requirements for OFBiz, two
small functions took care of the complex directory structure)
    - It handles all the external jar files by downloading any

dependencies

directly via internet
    - Jars can be upgraded by simply changing a string
    - It has matured a lot and has a high level of support in tools,IDEs,
books, documentation
    - It also has a lot of plugins which means that it works with pretty
much all build systems, supports multiple programming languages, and many
other features (e.g. OSGi)

We understand that it can help us make OFBiz more modular and also

setting

up a framework for managing addons would be a lot easier.

So what's been done?
Taher has been working very hard on a patch for the trunk that completely
replaces Ant with Gradle.  (Huge thanks to David for providing some

example

scripts to help us get started!) The patch is now ready to be applied to
the trunk and includes the following:

     - java -jar ofbiz.jar is now replaced with -> gradlew 'ofbiz
--whatever-options-here'
     - In addition to gradlew 'ofbiz' we also have gradlew 'ofbizDebug
--whatever'. What does that mean? It means we can run debug on ALL ofbiz
commands, not just start
     - If we decide to change the source directory structure in components
say from /src to /src/main, it would literally be a change of 5

characters

in the build script
     - We can immediately move all jar files if we want to a unified
location in /lib for example
     - We can delete most of the jars and declare them as dependencies
saving space and resources
     - We can automate the creation of the .classpath file so when we
update libraries no need to do this manually (under development)
     - We can ignore components that are not define in the xml files for
loading (under development)
     - We can introduce unit tests with about 10 minutes of work

We are finding that the flexibility and control we are getting with

Gradle

is truly amazing. We know that Gradle will be a major change to the

project

but we think that it will significantly improve the project by removing a
lot of build complexity and take care of that essential dependency
management that we need to comply with.

Our next steps will be to apply the patch to the trunk and then continue
the re-factoring work. We will need to organise some knowledge transfer

so

that all our committers understand what the changes are and how they

would

need to work in the future.

The PMC are very, very excited about having Gradle as part of future of
OFBiz and we hope that the community will think so too. As always,

feedback

welcome.

Thanks
Sharan

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