Hello We are working on a project consisting on multiple projects and are using Apache Ivy for defining dependencies between projects and between third party libraries. Dependencies are described in ivy.xml files so it works well also with the IvyDE Eclipse plugin. For building, we are using Apache Ant. Unfortunately we have come to the point when ant prooves itself to be insufficient for reaching our requirements. We need special dynamic building features that and itself cannot provide.
Therefore we'd like to use some more suitable building system. Gradle seems to be able to fulfill our needs. I personally don't like much the conventions (defaults, implicit values) because I rather specify all mandatory properties manually so I allways know what property is set to what value. I also don't like that the one functionality can be written in many ways - then it looks like a perl, where each programmer writes in his own way and then other programmers can hardly understand the code. I would also rather write my build scripts in java than in groovy. I wouldn't mind the code verbosity. It is better for me than that amount of the groovy's syntactic sugar. In any case, Gradle seems to be is still better than Ant. But the major blocker from starting to use gradle is its (in)ability to reuse existing ivy.xml files. We don't want to specify dependencies in the gradle files but want still to benefit from other gradle dependency/multiproject features. According to the manual this should be possible, but we've found no example how to use it. We want to stay using ivy.xml because of IvyDE (autocompletion and library/project dependency handling inside eclispe). So, is this actually possible with gradle? If yes, then how? The best for us would actually be building system where we can write build rules directly in the java and then compile it all. Actually a great would be just a building library providing ant-like tasks (not ant.jar, as it relies on some of its weird principles). Is there something like that? I know, I am in the gradle mailing list, but maybe somebody can help :-). We'll appreciate any help. Thanks in advance. -- Martin Zdila CTO M-Way Solutions Slovakia s.r.o. Letna 27, 040 01 Kosice Slovakia tel:+421-908-363-848 mailto:[email protected] http://www.mwaysolutions.com xmpp:[email protected] (Jabber) skype:m.zdila --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe from this list, please visit: http://xircles.codehaus.org/manage_email
