On Tue, 2009-05-26 at 17:16 -0700, Dean Schulze wrote: Gradle is a plugin-based, convention-based system. So whilst you can create tasks which do all the compilation according to manually set up rules à la Ant (or better still Gant), people generally just use the conventions and the plugins à la Maven. So if your Java source is in src/main/java and you use then java plugin then Gradle will just cause all the Java source to be compiled.
Convention-based systems win in (almost) all situations. > > Those links are the same material that is in the user guide, which > I've read twice and still don't have a clue about how to use gradle to > build a j2ee project. > > I've written many Ant builds, some very complex, but your > documentation doesn't give me a clue about how to do basic things like > compile .java files. > > The problem is that chapter 6 is cryptic. A typical J2EE project has > source files that get compiled with javac, web artifacts like .html > and .jsp pages that simply get moved to a directory in the .war > structure, and deployment descriptors. > > I don't see any of that in your documentation. > > How do I compile my .java files? How do I specify the src/ and output > directories? How do I move artifacts into WEB-INF/lib, etc? > > Ant, for all of its shortcomings is at least intuitive. The > attributes and child elements of <javac>, <jar>, and <war> correspond > to the underlying tools. Ant falls flat on its face, however, with > simple things like doing if ... else... You can't change the value of > a property, and lots of other things. That's really what I'm looking > for from gradle. > > If chapter 6 is the "normal" way to do things in gradle, then you've > made very straight forward things cryptic. If I wanted that I'd use > Maven. > If you don't want the power of a convention-based system, then you can use the old-fashioned, low-level, manual, explicit Ant way of doing things (*). Gradle does support this, but as you say it is not as well documented as that is not how Gradle is supposed to be used. The documentation is there though in the bits that show how tasks are created and how Ant tasks can be used. It is possible to transliterate an Ant file to a Gradle file, though it might just be easier to use Gant -- there is a terminology change between Ant and Gradle where there is not between Ant and Gant. Gant is just an Ant task scripting system in Groovy, Gradle is a full convention-based build system. Of course it may be that your build actually does need explicit low-level stuff, in which apologies for over-stating the case for convention. However, I would be surprised. Hans, Adam, et al. have been careful to ensure all the common use cases have appropriate convention-based approaches. (*) Not too over the top I hope ;-) -- Russel. ============================================================ Dr Russel Winder Partner Concertant LLP t: +44 20 7585 2200, +44 20 7193 9203 41 Buckmaster Road, f: +44 8700 516 084 voip: sip:[email protected] London SW11 1EN, UK. m: +44 7770 465 077 xmpp: [email protected]
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