On Thu, 2009-06-04 at 14:44 -0400, Paul Speed wrote: > > 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 think it is important that sight of this point is not lost: Gradle is
a generalized relationship resolution and Groovy code execution
framework on which a convention-based build framework is layered.
> 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...
It is true that criticism is often taken as a negative view of
something, but that is not actually true in English, criticism means to
make a judgement about something. This can actually be praise for
something as well as the more usual negative thing.
Being critical is good. :-)
At the risk of being accused of being a rampant self-publicist: I am at
the minute trying to justify to myself writing a book on Gradle. This
would be a technical publication -- so aimed at practicing (and
practising as well :-) programmers with both the Groovy aware and Groovy
ignorant in mind. The book would be example and use case driven and
would complement, augment and be different from all the online materials
that Hans, Adam, et al. maintain. I have made a start on it, but as I
say there are issues. The most important of these is how to make money
from the book, either directly or indirectly, so that I can fully
justify writing it -- as opposed to working on other books of which
there are three others vying for my time.
Currently Gradle is such a small project with so little take up
(relative to Ant, Maven, Make, etc.), that the likes of O'Reilly,
Pragmatic Programmers, APress, Manning are really not that interested,
though I could contact them again about this. The alternative is to
self-publish in some way or another. This is an increasingly serious
route given Amazon and others print on demand systems.
--
Russel.
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Dr Russel Winder Partner
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Concertant LLP t: +44 20 7585 2200, +44 20 7193 9203
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