Once in a while, when talking about Gradle with developers, at conferences or within the Groovy community (but with the wider Java community as well), I hear questions about Gradle. In particular Gradle vs Maven, or whether developers adopt the Kotlin DSL for Gradle builds. In the past, I blogged several times about using BigQuery and the Github dataset to analyze open source projects hosted on Github, by running some SQL queries against that dataset. Read more...

There are various options for building your Groovy projects: including Ant with the Groovyc Ant task, or with Gradle Groovy plugin. But today, I’d like to speak about Maven. You have actually two possible choices: GMaven or the Groovy Eclipse Maven plugin. GMaven GMaven 1.4 already allowed you to use Groovy 2.0 even before the final release of Groovy, although a new 1.5 version is about to be released soon, which should also include the option to use the “invoke dynamic” support which is currently missing for GMaven 1. Read more...

I’m glad I just received my Maven Developer’s Notebook, from O’Reilly. My friend Vincent Massol and Tim O’Brien co-authored this great book on Maven, a definitely needed reading for all those who want to learn more about Maven, or who wants to get started quickly. I had the chance of being one of the reviewers and it allowed me to learn quite a few tricks in the process, at the same time I was converting one of my projects at work to a “mavenized” build process and integrating it inside Luntbuild for continuous integration. Read more...

Recently, on Maven’s user list, someone wanted to be able to script Maven with Groovy, like it was already possible with BeanShell or Jython thanks to specific Jelly tags. But unfortunately, Maven didn’t provide that kind of support for Groovy. But there are good news on that front since Jeremy Rayner contributed a nice Groovy Ant task. That Ant task will be available in the upcoming Groovy release (jsr-02), so if you want to play with Maven and Groovy, you’ll have to build Groovy from sources in the meantime. Read more...

Maven is a pretty powerful tool, but sometimes, simple things can get complicated… I had to customize my build to upload some files through FTP. But it wasn’t just a mere artifact to upload through FTP to the enterprise repository, so I couldn’t use Maven’s artifact plugin and its FTP method. So the solution was to use Ant’s optional FTP task. At first, it doesn’t seem very complicated, since Maven can basically use any Ant task very easily, but the fact is that this optional Ant task is dependent on another library that you have to add to Maven’s root classloader, otherwise you’ll get a NoClassDefFound! Read more...

Being a groovy despot, I was in the process of redeploying groovy’s web site and also the latest snapshot jars of the distribution which a lot of guys have asked for. But I was having some problems with my setup, ssh connection, maven goals, etc. With Trygve and Bob, we were chatting about that, and here is an interesting snippet of the ongoing discussion: trygvis: bob: dist is a recursive symlink bob: yes, I know bob: it’s broken bob: I’ll fix it bob: and I’ll smack the next person who tells me about it trygvis: DO IT NOW! Read more...