What is the purpose of Gradle?

Question

I could use a little help understanding the concepts behind Gradle(plugin v 0.7) in the context of Android Studio 0.4.0. I have not used Gradle before and it\'s causing me n

Answer 1

What are these dependencies?

There are so many cool libraries you might decide to use. And a lot of these libraries are supporting the integration with gradle now. So no more importing the project and hosting it yourself. Everything is hosted on mavencentral. You still need the support library for example, even if you decide to target API 11+.

What is a Gradle wrapper?

A gradle wrapper is an awesome tool, if you're working in a team, or especially on an open source project. You don't need to have gradle installed. The gradle wrapper will download and cache all its dependencies on the first run. So all the developers on your team can build the project really quickly.

Why does Gradle need to be online constantly?

Because the dependencies need to be synced. You're in luck, if you are using Android Studio though. The latest version supports a "gradle offline mode".

From the release notes:

Studio now supports Gradle Offline mode. This is useful if you find yourself without a network connection, and your dependencies are using the plus-syntax to pick up the latest available version. In that case, Gradle will once per day (by default) connect to the artifact repository to see if there is a more recent version. If that network connection fails, the build fails. If you don't have a network connection, this is problematic. You can now open the Compiler > Gradle options and enable Offline mode, which will tell Gradle to ignore update-to-date checks:

Why is it important that Gradle uses Groovy?

You write gradle plugins in Groovy. And all your gradle tasks in build.gradle as well.

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Caution: I'm not an expert in gradle. In fact a relatively new user as well.