for normal dependency management you shouldn't need to write code. I've never done any android dev, so I can't comment on that. declaring a dependency is literally like this:
But I am not going to be the great gradle defender :) I have many complaints..... I would have much preferred that Rake became the default build system for java. Sadly that approach never took off....
Yeah, for normal dependencies that's true. But on Android you quickly get some additional things that have to be handled by the build system:
* Code generation from annotations (reflection on Android is slow, so doing code generation is way better)
* Attaching native .so libraries in proper directories of APK (Maven plugin does that automatically, Gradle needed writing code for that to work)
* Properly handling RenderScript backwards compatibility library (there was no Gradle support for that at all)
* Testing - Robolectric is still not supported which throws a wrench into whole Jenkins/TeamCity autotest stack and needs fiddling with emulators
dependencies { compile group: 'commons-collections', name: 'commons-collections', version: '3.2' testCompile group: 'junit', name: 'junit', version: '4.+' }
But I am not going to be the great gradle defender :) I have many complaints..... I would have much preferred that Rake became the default build system for java. Sadly that approach never took off....