> Maven also suffers from XML hell, but at least it has dependency management.
I don't find it that bad. The nice thing about it is how my IDE will auto complete almost everything and it should be possible to validate it without even using an IDE, as it has a schema. I agree with your complaints about Ant.
The thing I was hoping gradle would give me is the ability to write tests for my build. EG: I want to have more confidence that my maven filtering is working the way I want it to. But it sounds like gradle isn't built with that in mind.
Considering that groovy is dynamically typed, if my IDE doesn't auto complete (maybe it does) I think it's possible to make the argument that Maven is the least awful of the 3. At least the maven XML has a schema. I don't need yet another way to make a mistake in my build script (ie: typing issues).
> Java devs do many things manually that a Ruby/Python dev would be horrified at....
w/ regards to gradle using groovy.... in gradle I can easily add in variables to my dependencies, I can write conditionals (if System Prop X then include dependency Y).
Basically anything you can do in code, you can do in gradle very easily.
Auto-complete does work in IntelliJ 13 - at least for groovy code type stuff. Nothing for the gradle DSL (that could be implemented of course).
> Java devs do many things manually that a Ruby/Python dev would be horrified at....
Jenkins config - almost every one does this by hand. Jenkins jobs weren't really even designed to be automated (ironic, eh), you have to build a full xml doc for each job rather than say apply a similar change across all jobs (add in a -D param across all jobs for example). I know this is a Jenkins specific issue, but this mentality is very common in java land.
Others: have every dev manually install a database for their environment (Chef/Puppet/Ansible solve this - and what are they written in? Ruby/Python)
No one would ever use java for any scripting type work, the JVM startup time is awful + the file/string libs are far less powerful/usable than ruby/python.
Of course a java dev can learn one of the scripting langs, but they typically don't.
this is just my experience, but note I've seen a lot of shops...
Writing tests for your build script is an interesting idea. I wonder if this would be easy to do in something like SBT where the build definition is itself an SBT project.
I don't find it that bad. The nice thing about it is how my IDE will auto complete almost everything and it should be possible to validate it without even using an IDE, as it has a schema. I agree with your complaints about Ant.
The thing I was hoping gradle would give me is the ability to write tests for my build. EG: I want to have more confidence that my maven filtering is working the way I want it to. But it sounds like gradle isn't built with that in mind.
Considering that groovy is dynamically typed, if my IDE doesn't auto complete (maybe it does) I think it's possible to make the argument that Maven is the least awful of the 3. At least the maven XML has a schema. I don't need yet another way to make a mistake in my build script (ie: typing issues).
> Java devs do many things manually that a Ruby/Python dev would be horrified at....
Such as?