Saturday, January 21, 2012

What's Gradle?

I think title for this post should be “Best of both Worlds - Maven & Ivy”. In todays world these are the most commonly used configuration management & Build Management tool. Here i'm assuming that you have prior knowledge of Maven or Ivy. And If you had chance to play with Maven or Ivy, most of you would agree with my next statement. Ivy is far superior dependency management tool then Maven and Maven is far better build integration automation tool then Ivy. Developers and Architects needed a tool that can combine functionality of these two outstanding tools.
Gradle, in my opinion has been evolved from Maven & Ivy. As we all know both Maven & Ivy are excellent tools, but both of these have some limitations, and that’s where Gradle is going to win!
It can work with Maven or Ivy repository to jars or directory to local file system. One interesting part is, different from Maven or Ivy, Gradle scripts are Groovy based not XML.
Here’s excellent user guide for Gradle.

http://gradle.org/docs/current/userguide/userguide_single.html#multiProject