GRADLE FOR ANDROID AND THE REST OF THE WORLD

The build cycle for Android apps is very complex. To cope with this the Google Android team developed a Gradle plugin. In fact Google selected Gradle as the foundation of the Android SDK build system. Gradle is therefore also integrated with the Android Studio IDE in a much neater way then the Gradle Eclipse plugin developed by the SpringSource STS team. For those who didn't know it yet, yes, the Spring Framework is also build with Gradle. If Spring and now even Google positions Gradle as the build system of choice, I think we did the right thing when we went with Gradle 4 years ago. We do however need to revaluate whether or not Ivy is the best choice for our dependency management system. We should have a closer look at the Gradle Eclipse plugin. May be this plugin can already resolve dependencies in your workspace and change your classspath accordingly. Who knows, may be it does even a better job then the Ivy-plugin. Normally this talk would also highlight the usefulness of these new features for other platforms like C++, bud sadly there wasn't enough time left.