Is there a proper way to create plugins for Gradle yet? Pre M3 I could just install a jar file under the lib/plugins directory and that was it.
Now it looks like we are supposed to be using "apply from" scripts, but my co-workers keep running into odd problems with cache, or 301 redirects. It's really annoying, and it's making it very hard to keep justifying our use of Gradle. I really like Gradle - it's simplified my life and it made my job of setting up a common build environment/settings, etc... very easy. However, it seems that the area of plugins has been somewhat neglected in recent releases of Gradle and I'd like to know when we can expect some level of solidification on the subject. Otherwise, I'll probably be forced to switch all our Java projects to Maven 2, and I highly doubt there will be any movement back to Gradle once that's done. Plugins should be easy to implement, and easy to use. This was the case with M3, but in my opinion, it seems to be quickly slipping into the "not so much" area. Ex. This was great: apply plugin: "chegg-corp" Which worked with M3 by installing the chegg-corp.jar file into the lib/plugins directory. Post M3, that didn't work anymore and was replaced with "apply from" scripts. Ex. This is acceptable: apply from: " http://internal.host/gradle-plugins/installation/chegg-corp.groovy"; However, this worked for a while until M8/M8a/M9, where it now works "most of the time". We are seeing some issues when there's a 301 redirect here, or if any dependency jars downloaded by these scripts get's updated. http://issues.gradle.org/browse/GRADLE-1210 It's also not that easy to implement this solution because of at least one outstanding bug: http://issues.gradle.org/browse/GRADLE-1517 http://issues.gradle.org/browse/GRADLE-2136 (think this is a duplicate of the one above) This caused some weird, but necessary code adjustments to our plugin's "apply from" scripts. Ex. it's now necessary to check to see if the plugin is applied before applying it otherwise Gradle errors out saying that the plugin is already installed. Eg: buildscript { repositories { ivy { name = 'gradle_templates' artifactPattern " http://launchpad.net/[organization]/trunk/[revision]/+download/[artifact]-[revision].jar " } } dependencies { classpath 'gradle-templates:templates:1.2' } } // Check to make sure templates.TemplatesPlugin isn't already added. if (!project.plugins.findPlugin(templates.TemplatesPlugin)) { project.apply(plugin: templates.TemplatesPlugin) } The last option really is to copy the above code into their own build scripts for each of the plugins they want to include, and this is NOT acceptable to me. My question then is this. Are plugins going to be ironed out for Gradle 1.0, and if so, how long before we can expect 1.0? Looking through the roadmap, I know there's a discussion going on (that I've participated in) regarding this: http://forums.gradle.org/gradle/topics/plugin_portal_improving_plugin_development But that page says it's not planned until after 1.0. Is that correct? -- Learn from the past. Live in the present. Plan for the future. Blog: http://eric-berry.blogspot.com jEdit <http://www.jedit.org> - Programmer's Text Editor Bazaar <http://bazaar.canonical.com> - Version Control for Humans
