Question: Why task rules vs. concrete tasks?

[dougborg]

I was just wondering what your take on this was. I was initially very attracted to task rules in a lot of my Gradle work. I later found that I usually already knew exactly what tasks I needed to create so it was pretty easy to adjust the rule to actually create a concrete task. This is nice from a user perspective because then gradle tasks gives you more info, you can use the short-hand camel-casing stuff, etc.

Specifically related to the gradle-node-plugin, I could see creating concrete tasks based on the output of npm --help or even a static list maintained in the plugin. This concept would also apply to the gradle-grunt-plugin you maintain. Let me know what you think.

[srs]

Hi.
I'm a fan of concrete tasks and have not used task rules that much. Concrete tasks could be created using NodeTask and NpmTask right now, but do you suggest creating them using a list of some sort? If you have some ideas on how that would look I would be very interested.

BR,
Sten Roger

[dougborg]

Yeah I have a couple ideas on this, but after thinking about it for a while, I am not really sure how much value it will end up providing. I'll outline what I was thinking though for anyone else who thinks it may be useful. Or maybe I will just end up talking myself into thinking it is a good idea after all.

My basic thought on approach was to create tasks automatically by use the output of npm completion or npm --help to generate a list of tasks for npm. For the grunt plugin, we would load up a list of tasks by either analyzing the Gruntfile, invoking grunt -h, or running some javascript to grab a task list from grunt some other way. It may even make sense to just have a list of tasks we know would be useful and maintain it as we see fit.

You could then loop through the list to create your tasks:

def npmCommands = [ "npm update", "npm cache clean", "npm config set" ]

npmCommands.each { String npmCommand ->

  def npmArgs = (npmCommand - "npm").tokenize()
  def taskName = "npm" + npmArgs*.capitalize().join()

  project.task(taskName, type: NpmTask) {
    group = 'Node'
    description = "Run \'${npmCommand}\'."
    args = npmArgs
  }
}

Concrete tasks may be easier for users to reason about and are a bit more discoverable than task rules. The show up nicely when you run gradle tasks:

...

Node tasks
----------
nodeSetup - Download and install a local node/npm version.
npmCacheClean - Run 'npm cache clean'.
npmConfigSet - Run 'npm config set'.
npmInstall - Install node packages from package.json.
npmSetup - Setup a specific version of npm to be used by the build.
npmUpdate - Run 'npm update'.

...

[srs]

That's pretty nice. I like the idea that you could specify something like this:

node {
  npmCommands = [ "npm update", "npm cache clean", "npm config set" ]
}

And then it will automatically create the task definitions for you. But not sure if that's a feature that is really needed. Just looks nice :-)