Avoiding Neighbours

Ever wondered how to find dependencies that are no longer up to date in Gradle? Well Ben Manes has the plugin for you in the Gradle Versions Plugin . I'm not going to detail how to use it, it is plainly documented on his site, needless to say ensuring that your dependencies are as up to date as possible is crucial to managing your software, if you don't know that the libraries are out of date then you can't make sensible decisions on your software versioning.

Gradle is a great tool for building Java projects, in my opinion it is much better than its only real competitor Maven . A lot has been written about Gradle especially with comparison to Maven and building with it, I'm not really going to cover that. What I am going to do is highlight a few plugins which I find invaluable when putting a Gradle script together for a Java project. Release Management Maven has the well known and well publicised 'Maven Release Plugin' , but what is there for Gradle? Well there are a few options out there (search for gradle release plugin) but for me the best one is the Axion Release Plugin . This nicely separates the release management from the building of the software, in addition the versioning is controlled by the source control system tags rather than in Maven where it goes and edits the XML files and has to push these back to the repository. Distribution Ever struggled with the question 'How should I distribute my Java ap