Building GWT application with Gradle

I wanted to check out Gradle in a small GWT application that we build for a very specific purpose. The Gradle version I've used is 0.61. Gradle has a plugin concept, but I haven't seen any GWT plugin for Gradle. The setup ended up being rather easy.

I defined a task which used ANT's Java task:

task gwtCompile << {
  created = (new File(gwtBuildDir)).mkdirs()
  ant.java(classname:'com.google.gwt.dev.Compiler', failOnError: 'true', fork: 'true') {
    jvmarg(value: '-Xmx184M')
    arg(line: '-war ' + gwtBuildDir)
    arg(line: '-logLevel INFO')
    arg(line: '-style PRETTY')
    arg(value: 'me.trond.app.MyApp')
    classpath {
      pathElement(location: srcRootName + '/' + srcDirNames[0])
      pathElement(path: configurations.compile.asPath)
      pathElement(path: configurations.gwtCompile.asPath)
    }
  }
}

If you look at the classpath elements I've included a special configuration called gwtCompile. I had to define my own configuration:

configurations {
  gwtCompile
}

This also had to be reflected in the dependencies:

dependencies {
  ...
  gwtCompile (
          [group: 'com.google.gwt', name: 'gwt-user', version: '1.6.4'],
          [group: 'com.google.gwt', name: 'gwt-dev', version: '1.6.4', classifier: 'windows']
          )
}

Since I use the war plugin for gradle I had to make sure that gwtCompile task got called before packaging up the war file:

war.dependsOn gwtCompile

Also ensured that the result of the gwtCompile got included in the war file:

war {
  //Adds the JavaScript and resources compiled by the GWT compiler
  fileSet(dir: file(gwtBuildDir) )
}