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The OpenJFX team is working on a replacement for our current build and test system. We have chosen Gradle as the basis for this new system based on its IDE support, community support, flexibility, and great command line support. This new system is now far enough along to start testing. The documentation included here below is preliminary, but should provide enough guidance to give our gradle build system a good test.

Gradle is a build system which might be defined as a cross between Ant, Maven, and Rake. Like Ant, Gradle is designed primarily as a declarative means to build Java projects. In fact, Gradle has the ability to call into any Ant tasks. Like Maven, Gradle can automatically download and manage dependencies between projects and with library dependencies. In Fact, it can be configured to download from maven central and handle dependency management transparently. Like Rake, Gradle is a DSL. It is not XML based. In fact, Gradle is based on Groovy, which is a dynamic language for the JDK which shares its syntax with Java. In fact, a Groovy script can be written completely using valid Java code, or you can "groovify it" by, for example, removing semi-colons.

Our build is based on Gradle Version 1.4. This page is not a guide on using Groovy, nor is it a Gradle DSL reference. Rather, it is simply going to walk through using our new build system. If you already know Gradle, much of this will be self-explanatory. A different page will go into detail regarding how the build system works, so that anybody so (un)fortunate as to have to work on build files can get up to speed quickly 

The prerequisites for using this document is to make sure you have downloaded Gradle 1.4 and installed it on your path. You must have successfully cloned openjfx, and must have already run the 'gradle -b generator.gradle' command in the rt repo. This will create a new sibling of rt called "javafx". All of the following assumes you are in this directory. In the next few months we will convert from our current project layout to the new one in the "javafx" directory, and these instructions will be modified accordingly.

Also, you need to have the native tools installed for native compilation.

Once you are setup and ready to go, the first thing you should do is generate the project files for your preferred IDE.

gradle netBeans

gradle idea

gradle eclipse

You can then leave the command line (hopefully forever!) and do all the rest of your work from within your IDE. No, really!

Unique Challenges of Working on the JDK

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