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I thought I was the jaded dev until I started reading these comments! There's a lot of stuff I hate about Android but, in my opinion, the tools, first and third

I thought I was the jaded dev until I started reading these comments! There's a lot of stuff I hate about Android but, in my opinion, the tools, first and third party libraries, testing support, and design have made really great progress this year alone. Android Studio and the Gradle plugin are really, really coming along (and I'm on Linux!), the Support libraries are filling in a lot more holes than they ever did before (and I have to support Gingerbread!), Robolectric is at 3.0 RC3 and you can finally run it in Android Studio, and Material Design is getting more well defined and seeing more and more saturation into other tech (Polymer hit 1.0!).

vorg 11y ago
> Android Studio and the Gradle plugin are really, really coming along Too bad Gradle only allows us to use one language (i.e. Groovy) to configure the builds. Because Maven uses generic XML, any language can sit atop it. E.g. Polyglot Maven [1] not only allows us to use Groovy, but also Clojure, Scala, and Ruby to configure its builds. [1] https://github.com/takari/polyglot-maven https://github.com/takari/polyglot-maven
- niedzielski 11y ago
  Build systems have been particularly tumultuous for Android. It was unfun to build an app in Eclipse, then want CI and have to write a lot of boilerplate in Ant. The complete translation of all that Ant code and related CI materials to Gradle / Android Studio took weeks for my team on a large codebase. And, if you're a platform dev, you also have to support nonrecursive Make. I'm not a big Groovy fan either but I am a big fan of picking something that works. The transition was painful but I'm glad the road ahead looks clear and focused.
  - vorg 11y ago
    If Gradle's configuration API was opened up so other languages besides Groovy were allowed, such as Clojure, Scala, JRuby, and even Jython, Gradle would attract a lot more developers who are put off by Groovy. Even Gradle's website and promotional materials avoids using the word "Groovy", instead saying "Gradle DSL", but that's not enough to win over hardcore Python or Ruby shops. As for your case and many others already reluctantly using Groovy in Gradle, translating it all from Groovy-Gradle to, say, Ruby-Gradle wouldn't take weeks but hours because only the syntax would need to be translated almost one-to-one, leaving all the Gradle configuration names and sequences unchanged. In fact, because it could be done incrementally, only minutes spread out over several days.

vorg 11y ago

> Android Studio and the Gradle plugin are really, really coming along Too bad Gradle only allows us to use one language (i.e. Groovy) to configure the builds. Because Maven uses generic XML, any language can sit atop it. E.g. Polyglot Maven [1] not only allows us to use Groovy, but also Clojure, Scala, and Ruby to configure its builds. [1] https://github.com/takari/polyglot-maven https://github.com/takari/polyglot-maven

niedzielski 11y ago
Build systems have been particularly tumultuous for Android. It was unfun to build an app in Eclipse, then want CI and have to write a lot of boilerplate in Ant. The complete translation of all that Ant code and related CI materials to Gradle / Android Studio took weeks for my team on a large codebase. And, if you're a platform dev, you also have to support nonrecursive Make. I'm not a big Groovy fan either but I am a big fan of picking something that works. The transition was painful but I'm glad the road ahead looks clear and focused.
- vorg 11y ago
  If Gradle's configuration API was opened up so other languages besides Groovy were allowed, such as Clojure, Scala, JRuby, and even Jython, Gradle would attract a lot more developers who are put off by Groovy. Even Gradle's website and promotional materials avoids using the word "Groovy", instead saying "Gradle DSL", but that's not enough to win over hardcore Python or Ruby shops. As for your case and many others already reluctantly using Groovy in Gradle, translating it all from Groovy-Gradle to, say, Ruby-Gradle wouldn't take weeks but hours because only the syntax would need to be translated almost one-to-one, leaving all the Gradle configuration names and sequences unchanged. In fact, because it could be done incrementally, only minutes spread out over several days.