Support for Gradle (and other) build tools

[maxlinc]

Maven remains popular, but there are many projects using Gradle, and many arguments for using it (see Dr. Dobb's Why Build Your Java Projects with Gradle Rather than Ant or Maven? or Gradle's features). This is especially true for devops tasks like creating JBoss deployment or configuration scripts, because Gradle is a more flexible scripting language, while Maven assumes a very specific lifecycle (building a java application).

It would be good if JBoss published official plugins for at least Maven & Gradle, and popular tools like SBT. The ZeroTurnaround Java Tools and Technologies Survey can give you an idea which tools are popular.

The plugins are similar enough that they can share a "core" that does most of the work so maintaining several types of plugins is not too difficult. You can see an example of this on the flyway project, where there is a flyway-core, flyway-ant, flyway-maven, flyway-gradle, and flyway-sbt. So you could create a new project for gradle, but it would probably make sense to extract a "jboss-plugins-core" from this project, or to rename this project to "jboss-plugins" and have it build several.

[jamezp]

Sorry for the long delay. I've forgotten to check the issues here in quite some time it seems. FWIW only the https://github.com/wildfly/wildfly-maven-plugin will get new features at this point.

There's been some discussions around creating a Gradle plugin. I've also thought about creating a "core" project too, but I'm not sure how useful it would be. The biggest issue so far has just been I haven't had time to learn how to write a Gradle plugin :)

For the most part the plugin just uses API's from WildFly. The only think that would be useful in a core plugin I can think of is just some of a helper class to create operations. Though it's probably worth having a look at it.