Gradle

Well, I've spent some time looking at Gradle, as it seems to be the new shiny toy in town for Java folks. From what I've read, it lives somewhere on the continuum between Ant and Maven. I set up a Travis CI build and hooked it up to my GitHub repository. That part was easy.

The part I'm flailing on is writing the Gradle build script. I spent a few hours on it, and now I'm wondering if I should defer that effort and go back to writing code. Football season is upon us afterall.

Speaking of code and design, my initial thought for building the app was that I would be able to retrieve live scores via some public feed. After having looked into it, it seems everyone wants to charge for that data( which of course makes sense). Data is gold. Especially data that changes. I know that I could get sports scores in a kind of skeevy way by ripping off ajax calls or using rest api's against their user agreements. That would kind of illegitimize my application though.

So for now, I need to get the data, keep from coupling that implementation to my core application, and swap out that data provider later.

I'm going back to coding, and I'll revisit this CI build thing later.

By the way, I'm kind of struggling with the accepted patterns for laying out a java project. In Visual Studio,I've always implemented my core business logic in dll's, and kept UI stuff with the main entry point. Although I'm currently working professionally on a WPF app utilizing PRISM framework, and that's kind of given me a new perspective on composite architecture.

Anyhow, every talks about Maven as being a bit of a nazi on enforcing project structure, and it wants it to look like this for a java project:

Project-parent-folder: -Android-Application-folder -pom.xml -Android-Tests-folder -pom.xml -Android-library-project-folder -pom.xml -pom.xml

The thing that's foreign to me is how a java project reflects exactly how the files and folders are on disk, while a .NET Visual Studio solution seems to abstract the "how it lives on the file system" part away. I know I risk sounding like the guy who is dogging java because I don't understand it, and I don't want to come off that way. Visual Studio is just my reference point after spending years there.

Anyway, back to the code...