Forgive my ignorance of, well, the entire Java platform.
I’m a .NET developer who needs to use Java and Scala on my next project. I’m interested in Gradle for its flexibility and its multi-project support.
However we will need to be IDE-independent - one team member must use Netbeans and I would like to use Idea. Would this work? I assume there would need to be some basic integration, such that when you “build” in the IDE then Gradle is invoked?
The reason I ask is that Netbeans doesn’t appear to have a Gradle plugin yet.
The docs and the DSL design look superb by the way.
Thanks, Pete.
IDEs typically don’t use Gradle to do their work (compile, test, etc.). Gradle would be the official judge for whether the build works. It would be used on the CI server, for generating documentation, for building releases, for developers to make sure that everything is alright (e.g. before a commit), and for any other automation that may be required. Traditionally, a Gradle build would be invoked from the command line, but IDEs are starting to support running Gradle builds from within the IDE. The STS Gradle plugin for Eclipse has offered this feature for a while.
An important question is how to get to a working IDE setup, provided that you already have a Gradle build. In the case of IDEA, you can either use Gradle’s ‘idea’ plugin to generate IDEA project files, or use IDEA’s Gradle plugin to import the project into the IDE. There is a third-party plugin for NetBeans, but I don’t know what its current state is. In the worst case, the NetBeans developer would have to manually set up the project in her IDE, possibly putting the resulting project files under source control.
Great, Thanks for the detailed answer!