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Moving to Gradle was a terrible mess. Ant was simple, effective and fast. Even now every time I fire up an Android build with gradle my laptop feels like it is

by seviu 10y ago

Moving to Gradle was a terrible mess. Ant was simple, effective and fast. Even now every time I fire up an Android build with gradle my laptop feels like it is going to fly. However Android has come a long way since the early days. The author focuses on the bad things we all know about. Android development is incrementally getting better every month. On top of that Android Studio is a way better development tool than Xcode. To the point that I wish Apple drops Xcode completely and starts using AppCode. - Android Studio has powerful refactoring tools. Xcode lets you do some basic refactoring only on Objective C - Despite gradle being a pain, it gives you dependency management. To get that on iOS you have to resort to third party tools like cocoapods or carthage (though swift has now one too) - Autocomplete works reliably, every single time - Translations are way easier to do. Android studio comes with a translation editor and translations are in one place. I welcome you to try to translate a storyboard on Xcode and maintain that. - Android Studio UI editor is now way better than what it used to be. Despite that, Interface Builder is still the king of UI editors. - Editing the UI XML is trivial on Android. Try to merge a storyboard or a xib... and Android Studio does not automatically modify your UI xml files every time you open them. - Signing on Android is a thing you configure once and that's it. I have wasted days dealing with signing problems on iOS. - Etc... However I enjoy more doing iOS development. I cannot explain why, it is a more pleasant experience. At least to me. I still love both platforms anyway.

vbezhenar 10y ago
I wonder, what's wrong with Gradle? I didn't develop for Android, but I use Gradle for plain Java projects and it's greatest build tool I've ever worked with. It's even better than Maven. Is it because of bad Android plugins?
- pjmlp 10y ago
  Usually builds are measured in minutes with all computer fans in full throttle. Google suggestions to ease the problems are to have a background daemon, using a JVM with at least 2GB allocated to it. Ant and Maven don't require any of this stuff to perform fast builds.
- lmm 10y ago
  It's slow, underdocumented, and unreliable. There are too many ways to do anything, and it's too easy to add a "1-line fix" that does something unmaintainable. It's better than ant, but a lot worse than maven.
  - smrtinsert 10y ago
    Define better? Ant was unquestionably faster and extensible via custom tasks which the Android team could have done. Gradle will never be a fast build tool due to its design goals. It was a clear mistake to switch to them if you applied any knowledge of build tools.
    - lmm 10y ago
      Ant builds have always been unmaintainable messes IME, via the incredibly verbose syntax and difficulty of organising tasks effectively. I have many issues with gradle but it at least seems to result in reasonably concise well-factored builds most of the time.

by seviu 10y ago

vbezhenar 10y ago

I wonder, what's wrong with Gradle? I didn't develop for Android, but I use Gradle for plain Java projects and it's greatest build tool I've ever worked with. It's even better than Maven. Is it because of bad Android plugins?

pjmlp 10y ago
Usually builds are measured in minutes with all computer fans in full throttle. Google suggestions to ease the problems are to have a background daemon, using a JVM with at least 2GB allocated to it. Ant and Maven don't require any of this stuff to perform fast builds.
lmm 10y ago
It's slow, underdocumented, and unreliable. There are too many ways to do anything, and it's too easy to add a "1-line fix" that does something unmaintainable. It's better than ant, but a lot worse than maven.
- smrtinsert 10y ago
  Define better? Ant was unquestionably faster and extensible via custom tasks which the Android team could have done. Gradle will never be a fast build tool due to its design goals. It was a clear mistake to switch to them if you applied any knowledge of build tools.
  - lmm 10y ago
    Ant builds have always been unmaintainable messes IME, via the incredibly verbose syntax and difficulty of organising tasks effectively. I have many issues with gradle but it at least seems to result in reasonably concise well-factored builds most of the time.