Gradle

Introduction Recently, I decided to create a tiny Android library called RxBattery, which is monitoring battery state of the device with RxJava and RxKotlin. I created a few Java and Android libraries already and this time I decided to use Kotlin programming language instead of Java to learn something new and write something more complicated than “Hello World” app. Here are my observations. Build System I used Gradle to build the project. It’s popular for JVM and Android apps nowadays and works fine with Kotlin. I just needed to add Kotlin Gradle Plugin and Kotlin STD Lib to the /library/build.gradle file to the classpath dependencies in buildscript section. I also needed to define sourceSets to allow IntelliJ and Android Studio recognize directories with sources. ...

Introduction I really like Gradle build system for JVM apps. It has flexibility like Ant and great dependency management capabilities like Maven. It addition, it doesn’t use XML notation, but Groovy programming language, so builds configurations are simple, concise, easier to read and easier to create. In my opinion, Gradle is truly modern build system for JVM apps. Nevertheless, there are projects, which are pretty old and use older systems like Ant. For example, all Hybris projects are based on Ant. Moreover, they have their custom setup and configurations, internal extensions system, etc. I was wondering if it’s possible to migrate Hybris Platform build from Ant to Gradle. That’s why I created a simple Proof of Concept. ...

Overview I’ve recently read great article telling how to improve quality and syntax of your Android code by Vincent Brison. It presents how to use tools like Checkstyle, Findbugs, PMD, and Android Lint for Static Code Analysis in Android project. Static Code Analysis allows us to keep consistency of the source code style and helps us to find errors, warnings, possible bugs, bottlenecks and ways to improve the projects. I highly recommend to use tools like those mentioned. ...

Introduction During software development process developers and QAs may want to have installed release and debug version of the app on a single device, what can be very helpful when they want to develop and use application at the same time. Another advantage is the fact that debug and release version of the app may need different configuration. It this post I will show you an example in which we are changing application name and launcher icon, but we can also change different values during compilation in the same way (e.g. address of the webservice). Some time ago, I’ve created similar template, but it was using older version of Build Tools, Android SDK and Android Studio. I’ve created new template, with the newest version of Android Studio (1.0.2) and newest version of Build Tools (1.0.0), so in that case, build.gradle file is smaller and simpler, but does its work correctly. ...

Some time ago, I had some troubles with configuring Java project with Gradle in IntelliJ IDEA CE. There is possibility to create new Gradle project in mentioned IDE, but for some reason it didn’t worked out-of-the box in my case on Ubuntu. I wanted to have pure, clean Java project with Gradle build system ready to open in IntelliJ IDEA. I found well configured simple project at: https://github.com/quinnliu/SampleGradleProject. Basing on that project, I created my simple template. I modified this project a little bit, added FEST assertions and wrote a few Unit Tests. In addition, I configured main class in build.gradle file in order to execute it via ./gradlew run command. My project template also has gradle wrapper, which is very convenient practice. ...