"... I always end up just trying a bunch of stuff that looks like it should be right. Fortunately, within four or five tries I get it right."
I share your pain. I haven't been able to figure out how to incorporate gradle into my existing projects either, and I don't have the time to futz with it. I don't know why gradle has to have this barrier to entry. An experienced Java/Ant developer should be able to pick up a groovy based build system quickly, but for some reason that isn't the case with gradle. Gradle has turned out to be more like Maven than Ant when it comes to learning curve. I wonder if the key to this problem is gradle's convention-based mentality. Most existing projects don't follow gradle's convention. They are all over the place. Refactoring existing projects to meet the gradle/Maven2 conventions is the tail wagging the dog and that will prevent gradle adoption and keep it a niche product. In this way convention based build tools have become an obstacle instead of a useful tool. You're right when you say we need non-trivial examples. Especially examples that don't follow the gradle/Maven2 convention. I've heard that it is easy to modify the Java plugin for other project structures - unless your tests are in the src/ directory. It sounds like what we need are real examples of modifying the Java plugin to work with some non-conventional project structures, or maybe even examples of how to write out own plugins for existing project structures. I also recently tried using the groovy AntBuilder tool as an alternative to Ant itself, but AntBuilder is broken. Instantiating an AntBuilder throws java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: org/apache/tools/ant/DemuxInputStream http://www.groovy-forum.org/viewtopic.php?p=1128&sid=03569a338075bc1a5881a4eaa4e9222f#1128 This happnes in Eclipse. (Yes I've changed my Ant Home setting to Ant 1.7.1 instead of whatever version of Ant comes bundled with Eclipse.) Maybe it would work outside of Eclipse, but if I can't use it from within Eclipse it's no good for me. Other people have seen this Exception and I've posted it to the groovy forum, but no one responds. There was a Thread about this a couple of months ago where Guillaume Laforge finally asked if the poster if he had found a work around. The poster replied that his work around was to go back to the Java way: http://www.gg3721.com/list/49/74177.html Groovy-based build tools should be good, but they arent. Trying to adopt groovy-based build tools has been a waste of time. Maybe Ant is still the best build tool out there. --- On Thu, 6/4/09, Paul Speed <[email protected]> wrote: From: Paul Speed <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [gradle-user] A naive question To: [email protected] Date: Thursday, June 4, 2009, 12:44 PM Hans Dockter wrote: >> What the User's Guide doesn't explain is that Gradle is a convention-based >> build system. > > I see this differently. Gradle offers optional plugins that allow for > convention based builds. You don't need to use and still have a powerful > general purpose build tool. > I haven't looked at the latest docs so I'm only going from the 0.5.2 ones but maybe what is needed are a few non-plug-in, non-trivial examples. I know I can do everything in gradle that I could do in ANT but not being a groovy expert and not knowing ant builder well (or whatever the ant-groovy thing is), I always end up just trying a bunch of stuff that looks like it should be right. Fortunately, within four or five tries I get it right. Sometimes I can find a near enough example in the documentation but I almost have to completely re-read it to pick those gems out. Not trying to be overly critical... -Paul --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe from this list, please visit: http://xircles.codehaus.org/manage_email
