On Jan 9, 2009, at 6:11 AM, Matt Welch wrote:
I've used Maven on my last few projects and it's be "ok". The idea
of a
script based build system appeals to me a great deal so I've spent
some time
looking into pretty much everything under the sun: Buildr, Raven,
Gant, and
a few others; and now Gradle. Of those I've tried, Gradle really
stands out.
It's easy to set up, the usage is fairly straightforward, and it's
infinitely flexible and configurable, but I'm starting up a new
project and
I find myself once again returning back to Maven. Why? Dependencies,
dependencies, dependencies.
As a matter of fact, dependency management is one of the two things
that I
really like about Maven. That transitive dependency management of
Maven just
works (most of the time, anyway). I like simply being able to tell
Maven
that I want to use Spring 2.5.6 or Hibernate 3.1 and then not having
to
worry about all of the extras that go along with it. The other half
of that
equation is the integration with my IDE. I use Intellij Idea and
keeping my
dependencies in sync between Maven and Idea is effortless.
When I tried Gradle, I ran into the following obstacles:
1) Specifying the dependencies in Gradle was very nice. It uses an
expressive, meaningful mechanism for this that is flexible enough to
handle
exclusions and additions to the transitivity of any dependency, but
there
was no way that I saw to then communicate those dependencies to my
IDE. I
had to manually add not only the main dependencies to my Idea project
(Spring, Hibernate, etc) but also all of those library's
dependencies as
well. Painful....
Gradle offers functionality to generate Eclipse project/classpath
files. Unfortunately It does not offer this yet for IntelliJ. There is
an issue for this: http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/GRADLE-190
What you can do as a workaround, is to write a little task in your
build script, which copies all dependencies to some project directory,
let's call it lib. Then you can declare this lib folder as an IntelliJ
jar folder. If dependencies have changed you can rerun this task, an
IntelliJ picks up the changes automatically.
2) Gradle did not retrieve the source and javadoc artifacts for the
dependencies. Yikes! Again, this means a huge amount of manual work
in my
IDE to add those things myself and then the pain of maintaining
those links
as dependencies evolved.
I agree. This is another thing we wan to provide in the not too
distant future.
- Hans
Since simple, integrated, dependency management is the main reason I
use
Maven over anything else, it's tough to switch away from it without
something to replace those capabilities. I am very new to Gradle so
perhaps
there are ways around these issues. I'd love to hear about them if
there are
because I'd really like to use Gradle.
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Hans Dockter
Gradle Project lead
http://www.gradle.org
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