Gradle is gaining more and more popularity as a build system. It combines the power of scripting with the simplicity of conventions. Declarative builds are very straightforward, where customizations do not end up in tons of messy configurations.
Currently, Mule has two ways of building projects:
- Apps can be built through Mule Studio, which is simple by nature but not very friendly with continuous integration, source control management and related tools.
- The recommended way to manage your build is with Maven. This plugin is integrated with Mule Studio and has a lot of power on its own.
Now the open source community has presented a brand new way of building Mule apps with Gradle. The project aims to provide a very simple way to build Mule apps that is friendly with continuous integration and can work easily with Mule Studio. One of the interesting things about Gradle is that it can reduce over 90% the complexity of the build if we compare it with the same build based on Maven.
The plugin in under development but it provides the basic features to build Mule apps:
- Supports building Mule Community apps
- Support for building Mule Enterprise apps including projects with DataMapper
- Support for updating Mule Studio metadata
- Support for APIKit Projects
- Support for Unit testing
We will continue to add features so more enterprise products are supported, such as deployments to the Mule Management Console (MMC). Please feel free to request features on the project’s issue tracker. Be sure to try it out and let us know about your experience below!
Be sure to check out part 2 of the series!
