Why I Moved Back from Gradle to Maven • Hacker News Board

Re: Why I Moved Back from Gradle to Maven

#21

Post by dljsjr » Tue, Apr 03, 2018, 8:55 PM UTC

derriz wrote: post #19

I can see the attraction in a build system based on a proper full featured programming language but I've never been tempted to try gradle because I believe the approach has a fundamental flaw. I.e. that it's impossible for IDEs to reliably extract useful project structure from the build description. Even as a 25 year vi/vim user, I've succumbed to depending on IDEs more and more and I believe that any proposed build…

The integration with IDEA and Eclipse for Gradle is actually quite good, the only downside is that it's "one-way". That is to say that you can't use the IDE's GUI to configure your build.

Gradle enables this as a first-class citizen by providing a "Tooling API": https://docs.gradle.org/current/userguide/embedding.html

I know that Buildship, the Eclipse plugin that integrates Gradle, is actually worked on pretty heavily by Gradle contributors. I don't know about IDEA but that's the IDE that I use for Java development and the Gradle integration is very, very good.

Re: Why I Moved Back from Gradle to Maven

#22

Post by wendelinsky » Tue, Apr 03, 2018, 8:56 PM UTC

bsder wrote: post #17

wendelinsky wrote: post #10

Yo, new Gradle developer experience lead here. I fully empathize that it's much too difficult to wrap one's head around Gradle, so I want to share some things you might find interesting: * The Gradle Kotlin DSL, which is nearing production-readiness, substantially improves the assistance/docs one gets through the IDE. * However, the Kotlin DSL does not help with the large API surface and understanding of Gradle conce…

Fix the documentation! Focus on Android Studio because that's the only place people really use Gradle because they are forced to do so. You need to create a LOT of Android Studio sample projects, and they need to be kept up to date for the various versions of Android Studio. If you did nothing but create "Hello World" in a zillion various flavors (Java, Kotlin, Scala, NDK, NDK with static library on different archite…

Thanks for the feedback. Docs/samples oriented around Android could use some love for sure. I think one thing we need to figure out is how Google and Gradle can accomplish these things together.

Re: Why I Moved Back from Gradle to Maven

#23

Post by dljsjr » Tue, Apr 03, 2018, 8:58 PM UTC

bsder wrote: post #17

wendelinsky wrote: post #10

Yo, new Gradle developer experience lead here. I fully empathize that it's much too difficult to wrap one's head around Gradle, so I want to share some things you might find interesting: * The Gradle Kotlin DSL, which is nearing production-readiness, substantially improves the assistance/docs one gets through the IDE. * However, the Kotlin DSL does not help with the large API surface and understanding of Gradle conce…

Fix the documentation! Focus on Android Studio because that's the only place people really use Gradle because they are forced to do so. You need to create a LOT of Android Studio sample projects, and they need to be kept up to date for the various versions of Android Studio. If you did nothing but create "Hello World" in a zillion various flavors (Java, Kotlin, Scala, NDK, NDK with static library on different archite…

Please don't say that nobody uses Gradle outside of Android devs. We're a shop that definitely does zero Android development and we still use Gradle, the fact that people assume Gradle Anroid Dev is already a huge pain point for us when we start looking for third party educational resources.

Re: Why I Moved Back from Gradle to Maven

#24

Post by acrive » Tue, Apr 03, 2018, 8:59 PM UTC

Because you don't know Groovy. Simple.

Maven it's only in your comfort zone. Bye.

Re: Why I Moved Back from Gradle to Maven

#25

Post by lmm » Tue, Apr 03, 2018, 9:04 PM UTC

rhacker wrote: post #4

I spent a good 18 years in the Java coding stack. I adopted Maven when they just released version 2 and watched one of its evangelists talk at a JavaOne. Obviously now it's insane to think about a programming language that doesn't have a dependency manager (even C/C++ has Conan!). After a long time fighting between what I liked best between Maven or Gradle I realized that the only thing I really needed was the parts…

> Now we simply have bash scripts that do all our one-offs that often were nightmares to accomplish in Gradle or Maven. Whether it is JAXB or Docker integration every maven/gradle plugin I ever used was 10 times harder than just bash.

This is the opposite of my experience. Trying to get consistent behaviour out of bash scripts is a nightmare (every nontrivial bash script has an undocumented dependency on a particular version of some system tool, every time you try to build on a new machine you're rolling the dice). Maven plugins are versioned and (usually) tested, have sane defaults, and will Just Work (provided you're willing to roll with their defaults rather than fighting it).

Re: Why I Moved Back from Gradle to Maven

#26

Post by kodablah » Tue, Apr 03, 2018, 9:05 PM UTC

bsder wrote: post #17

wendelinsky wrote: post #10

Yo, new Gradle developer experience lead here. I fully empathize that it's much too difficult to wrap one's head around Gradle, so I want to share some things you might find interesting: * The Gradle Kotlin DSL, which is nearing production-readiness, substantially improves the assistance/docs one gets through the IDE. * However, the Kotlin DSL does not help with the large API surface and understanding of Gradle conce…

Fix the documentation! Focus on Android Studio because that's the only place people really use Gradle because they are forced to do so. You need to create a LOT of Android Studio sample projects, and they need to be kept up to date for the various versions of Android Studio. If you did nothing but create "Hello World" in a zillion various flavors (Java, Kotlin, Scala, NDK, NDK with static library on different archite…

> Focus on Android Studio because that's the only place people really use Gradle because they are forced to do so.

False

Re: Why I Moved Back from Gradle to Maven

#27

Post by lmm » Tue, Apr 03, 2018, 9:06 PM UTC

acrive wrote: post #24

Because you don't know Groovy. Simple. Maven it's only in your comfort zone. Bye.

Gradle scripts are an undocumented superset of Groovy. It's not just Groovy, it's the fact that there's no consistent way to know what settings and defaults come from where.

(And really, why would you know Groovy these days? Is it even used for anything outside of Gradle anymore?)

Re: Why I Moved Back from Gradle to Maven

#28

Post by acrive » Tue, Apr 03, 2018, 9:07 PM UTC

ynezz wrote: post #20

> Gradle features: Great Performance Did I missed the sarcasm tone? I've never experienced slower build systems then those used in Java world, like Gradle for example.

https://blog.gradle.org/introducing-incremental-build-suppor...

Re: Why I Moved Back from Gradle to Maven

#29

Post by kodablah » Tue, Apr 03, 2018, 9:07 PM UTC

wendelinsky wrote: post #10

Yo, new Gradle developer experience lead here. I fully empathize that it's much too difficult to wrap one's head around Gradle, so I want to share some things you might find interesting: * The Gradle Kotlin DSL, which is nearing production-readiness, substantially improves the assistance/docs one gets through the IDE. * However, the Kotlin DSL does not help with the large API surface and understanding of Gradle conce…

The key point that Gradle needs to make clearer is to delineate between task creation and task execution and which code is running where. It is very confusing for people to know whether their code is going to execute at gradle file load or at task execution. People get confused that they can't just use the result of one task when setting the opts for another.

Edit: Also, I personally do the opposite route wrt the paradigm of the wrapper and the daemon. I don't commit a wrapper script and have people use a downloaded Gradle themselves. I also run --no-daemon on every manual execution for smaller projects. But I may not be normal here.

Re: Why I Moved Back from Gradle to Maven

#30

Post by lmm » Tue, Apr 03, 2018, 9:08 PM UTC

eecc wrote: post #13

Maven’s approach is a lost cause: you either expect any user to coerce their case into your model (and hope the plugin is documented, dependencies work (bwahahaha) and is maintained) or you breakout to some exec plugin and give up on platform agnostic builds. Sure, it’s an unforgiving ambition and many other systems fell trying, but it was their choice. With Gradle the blame falls squarely at the feet of plugins, and…

> you either expect any user to coerce their case into your model (and hope the plugin is documented, dependencies work (bwahahaha) and is maintained)

I find all the cases can be coerced, and it's not even hard. Some users seem to insist on customization for its own sake, "oh I absolutely must call my source folder source rather than src", but Maven does the right thing by ignoring those users, with the result that you can pick up any project that uses Maven and be immediately productive.