Would A Plugin Work As A Multi-Release Jar?

Help/Discuss Plugin Portal
1

Does Gradle provide any direct support for creating multi-release jars for plugins?

I found this Gradle blog post. But being new to Gradle, it wasn’t obvious to me whether the approach outlined there would work with the plugin development plugin. Will it?

Thanks.

2

Fifteen days of crickets forced me to eventually make the effort to figure my question out for myself. And the answer is a resounding: Yes! A Plugin Would Work As A Multi-Release JAR.

The project in this download contains a simple example.

The following commands build the plugin implemented in that downloaded project:

gradle publish

gradle --build-file=use.plugin.gradle hello

That puts into $buildDir/repo a Multi-Release JAR with a very simple plugin in it. The plugin was successfully tested with JDK 8, 9, 10 and 11.

For anybody interested, the plugin code itself and the plugin build logic I lifted from two of Gradle’s sample projects: here and here. The Multi-Release JAR build logic I lifted from here.

This simple example has convinced me that Multi-Release JARs are a lot cooler and way more useful than this one guy’s rant against them would have folks believe.