Just to document a suggestion I made in person at JavaOne:
Being a newbie, I often struggle with creating the wiring necessary for writing and automated testing custom plugins. It’s a big leap for a not-so-smart guy like me to go from Java/Ant/Ivy to Groovy/DSL/Gradle.
One idea that would help is the creation of builders for common tasks such as defining a module’s configurations, dependencies, & artifacts. I’m sure you have many better ones.
Let me throw out another idea that might be unpopular: Provide more APIs and examples in pure Java. I think you might find more adopters if the learning curve didn’t appear to be so steep. Sometimes, Groovy is the only way you can do some things. However, I constantly find myself being tripped up having to learn Groovy at the same time as Gradle. If I could just learn one thing at a time, that would have been better. It’d be great if the adoption curve had a roadmap with examples & APIs that were initially Java based with a few necessary Groovy closures and let people discover the more elegant solutions later on.