Gradle 2.0

[aw3c2]

Since I was unaware of what it is:

> What is Gradle?

> Gradle is build automation evolved. Gradle can automate the building, testing, publishing, deployment and more of software packages or other types of projects such as generated static websites, generated documentation or indeed anything else.

[dimillian]

I port my iOS App to Android, Android Studio, Gradle and Maven dependencies management are the best things for any Android dev ever. Gradle build scripts and configuration are totally awesome. Dependencies management just work.

Basically, if you're using Eclipse and Ant for a new Android app, you're doing it very wrong.

[pjmlp]

> Basically, if you're using Eclipse and Ant for a new Android app, you're doing it very wrong.

Until they fix the performance problems I will keep using Eclipse, even though I am not a big fan of it.

[edwinnathaniel]

Ant is... well let's just say if you're using Ant you're doing it wrong ;) (or that's a very-old-legacy-stuff)

[kachnuv_ocasek]

Recently, I had to write some code for an Android app (in Java, of course) and Gradle was the most pleasant thing about all of it. I think Android Studio would have perhaps surpassed it, had I used it more.

[babs474]

Gradle is fantastic and hopefully it helps bring awareness to the under appreciated groovy language.

[anonymouslee]

I certainly appreciate the syntactic sugar of Groovy as a clear improvement over vanilla Java. But with time as a scarce resource I've opted to learn Scala and Clojure instead. It would be great if somehow we could smush Gradle and sbt together to build a best of all possible worlds build system for Scala.

Back in 2009, James Strachan (the creator of Groovy) stated that if he'd known about Scala first he probably wouldn't have built Groovy [1]. This Dr. Dobb's article [2] also has some good points on evaluating Groovy and whether or not it will continue to thrive. The simplicity of its syntax vs scala is a great point for Groovy though.

[1] - http://macstrac.blogspot.com/2009/04/scala-as-long-term-repl... [2] - http://www.drdobbs.com/jvm/the-groovy-conundrum/240147731

[ebiester]

Don't most people in the JVM ecosystem know about groovy by now? I first heard about it when Maven 2 betas were coming out and it was the preferred way to write a plugin.

[laichzeit0]

I've used Groovy extensively for 4 years or so now. A product we used that ran on JBoss decided to use it as the plugin language to extend / use internal APIs. I really pity Java people who don't know or haven't used Groovy yet. It's like embedding Lua into your C app. Why people still write the bulk of their code in pure Java is beyond me.

The other day I learned that Solr supports Groovy as an embedded language to write extensions in. It's amazing.

[vorg]

> hopefully [gradle] helps bring awareness to the under appreciated groovy language

If Groovy's still under-appreciated after 10 years, there's got to be a reason.

[netcraft]

release notes here: http://www.gradle.org/docs/current/release-notes

[HNJohnC]

Why is nearly everyone who tries to drum up publicity here so clueless as to assume everyone knows what their product/app/library/whatever actually is?

What a terrible waste of publicity.

The very first sentence in any link should at least give a hint what the thing in question is and if it doesn't, it should not appear on Hacker News.

[StevePerkins]

I don't think Gradle needs to spam HN for publicity. It is the #2 (subjectively ranked) build system for Java and other JVM-based languages, and is arguably on the cusp on overtaking Maven for the #1 spot if it has not done so already. It has a pretty tight relationship with Spring and Grails, two of the top three frameworks for doing Java web development.

If you've done any real Java development within the past five years, then you at least know what Gradle is. If you haven't, then you won't, and that is perfectly okay. Frankly, this maxim is true of half the announcements on HN. If I don't recognize something at all, then usually it's a random Rust or Julia thing... and I've grown to conditioned to simply ignore it and skim onward.

I do agree that any public announcements SHOULD include a blurb for the new people who are hearing about the subject for the very first time. As far as HN irritations go, however, that bothers me a lot less than the tendency of announcement threads to turn "meta". Fewer comments on the subject matter itself... more comments on the announcement’s font selection or color scheme, copy verbiage, logo design, or just completely random digressions to discuss why Rust does it better, etc.

[joeblau]

Gradle is a build and dependency management tool for Java projects. It's been gaining popularity over alternatives like Ant. In my opinion, it has way to many features coupled into one product, but it's slowly becoming the standard.

[icambron]

Who says this is an attempt to drum up publicity? It's an announcement to the Gradle community, who presumably knows what it is and wouldn't be very interested in an explanation. Someone posted it to HN because they thought people interested in Gradle would care about the announcement, not because HN is a marketing channel. More generally, you are not the target audience of everything posted to the internet, or even of everything of interest to HN. That's OK.

[antsar]

I'd also add that my instinct was to click the Gradle logo, hoping to land at their homepage which should explain what Gradle is. Instead, it brought me to their forums.

I wonder how many other visitors were lost this way (Google Analytics should know, look for people going from this post to your Forums via the logo, and then exiting).

[general_failure]

While Gradle is quite popular, I agree with the general sentiment of this comment.

[handzhiev]

What do you expect when the first sentence on their site is "Gradle is build automation evolved.". How informative.