Gradle build automation tool hits 1.0

Version 1.0 of the open source Gradle build system has been announced by Gradleware co-founder Adam Murdoch. The enterprise project automation tool is built in Groovy and can be used to automate building, testing, publishing and deployment of software packages and other projects, such as static web sites or documentation. Gradle is described by its developers as combining "the power and flexibility of Ant with the dependency management and conventions of Maven".

With the stable 1.0 release, the developers say that they have moved away from using Apache Ivy for dependency resolution; the newly rebuilt dependency resolution engine now provides a more accurate and reliable dependency cache. The cache and other performance improvements contribute to faster builds using Gradle. The Gradle developers have also made it easier to integrate code quality tools such as Sonar, FindBugs, PMD and Checkstyle into the build process.

Gradle can natively be integrated into the Eclipse STS and Intellij IDEA IDEs (integrated development environments); experimental support for NetBeans is also included. Other new features include a new tooling API for embedding Gradle, new plugins and build scripts, and improvements to the build daemon which reduce the startup and execution time of builds. Preliminary support for building C++ based projects has also been added.

An overview of the 1.0 milestone and all of its features can be found in the official release announcement and in the release notes. Gradle 1.0 binaries and sources are available on the project's download page and documentation is provided. Hosted on GitHub, Gradle is published under the Apache Licence 2.0.

(crve)