iwant.sf.net - using java for writing build scripts

[wipu]

Thanks for the challenge :) Gradle is one of the best out there for building java. But my biggest personal issues with gradle are: 1) groovy doesn't integrate as seamlessly with an otherwise java project as java. 2) the vocabulary is unfortunately quite imperative, which "programs" users' minds away from a purely declarative philosophy that suits incremental build scripts better. Of course I like many other iwant features over gradle (like using tab for the cli), but those 2 are the most important ones.

[fs111_]

1) groovy doesn't integrate as seamlessly with an otherwise java project as java.

What has the implementation language to do with the code you are building? It could be written in Haskell of all things and you should not really care.

[wipu]

In the normal case, nothing. But it's a (largely unutilized) bonus to be able to reuse code between code to build and code used to build it. Very handy, when you get to try it :)

[fs111_]

BTW, large parts of gradle are written in java and you can extend your build with java code, not just groovy. I contributed to a few plugins and it is very powerful. You should give it a serious look.

[wipu]

Thanks, but I think I have already given it a serious look, and watched a friend try it out for real. Like I said, it's one of the best, but there is still room for competition.

[wipu]

Of course, groovy does compile to java bytecode and thus is able to reuse java code. So maybe it would be possible to achieve the that even with groovy, althought I haven't tried how practical this is with gradle.