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

Let's assume, that understanding of the following points serves as aggreeable basis:

1. What are classes, interfaces, APIs, packages, modules and libraries.

2. What are module dependencies and what means "dependency management".

3. A complexity of modern applications. Even if you do a simple "Hello, world" app (would it be a desktop application or web-application), it should include a dozen (if not a hundred) of various libraries. All these libraries provide infrastructure to your app, but many of them are not directly related to it's logic.

4. If your app is not "Hello, world", then hiding it's complexity (by proper modularization) and automating it's assembly and testing (by use of proper build tools) becomes crucial to success.

With this understanding in mind (and taking into account precious considerations, listed by dear colleagues above) it makes sense to start talking gradle, ant, ivy and maven.