StackOverflow2013

Note that there are some explanatory texts on larger screens.

plurals

PO
text
Body
copied!<p>Gradle put the fun back into building/assembling software. I used ant to build software my entire career and I have always considered the actual "buildit" part of the dev work being a necessary evil. A few months back our company grew tired of not using a binary repo (aka checking in jars into the vcs) and I was given the task to investigate this. Started with ivy since it could be bolted on top of ant, didn't have much luck getting my built artifacts published like I wanted. I went for maven and hacked away with xml, worked splendid for some simple helper libs but I ran into serious problems trying to bundle applications ready for deploy. Hassled quite a while googling plugins and reading forums and wound up downloading trillions of support jars for various plugins which I had a hard time using. Finally I went for gradle (getting quite bitter at this point, and annoyed that "It shouldn't be THIS hard!")</p> <p>But from day one my mood started to improve. I was getting somewhere. Took me like two hours to migrate my first ant module and the build file was basically nothing. Easily fitted one screen. The big "wow" was: build <em>scripts</em> in xml, how stupid is that? the fact that declaring one dependency takes ONE row is very appealing to me -> you can easily see all dependencies for a certain project on one page. From then on I been on a constant roll, for every problem I faced so far there is a simple and elegant solution. I think these are the reasons:</p> <ul> <li>groovy is very intuitive for java developers <li>documentation is great to awesome <li>the flexibility is endless </ul> <p>Now I spend my days trying to think up new features to add to our build process. How sick is that? </p>

Querying!

Guidance

An individual column

Larger individual text columns get their own page to allow for proper reading.

SQuiL has stopped working due to an internal error.

If you are curious you may find further information in the browser console, which is accessible through the devtools (F12).

Reload