I currently need to generate some java sources from a wsdl with Gradle. In Maven, I’ve done this using the cxf-codegen-plugin but I want to avoid using anything that’s maven in my new build. And there’s several resources out there who will either tell you to call WSDLToJava via cxf’s ant task or directly. The ‘direct’ way still leaves you with several possibilities like calling ProcessBuilder from your Gradle Task or using a JavaExec Task. I went for the last.

I currently need to generate some java sources from a wsdl with Gradle. In Maven, I’ve done this using the cxf-codegen-plugin but I want to avoid using anything that’s maven in my new build. And there’s several resources out there who will either tell you to call WSDLToJava via cxf’s ant task or directly. The ‘direct’ way still leaves you with several possibilities like calling ProcessBuilder from your Gradle Task or using a JavaExec Task. I went for the last.

Here’s another little “gotcha” on gradle tasks. When they’re triggered. I’ve seen quite a few posts on stackoverflow along the lines of “How can I call a gradle task”. You can’t (Well ok you could but you don’t want to). It is executed as a dependency of another task.

Going back to that little copy task I wanted to execute, I needed it to run roughly somewhere after the clean task and before jar task. I ended up making my copy task dependent of compile. That didn’t work so I tried compileJava and classes and… only to later realize that the dependency was in the wrong direction: My task depends on one that is being executed but that doesn’t trigger my task, it merely states that my task, should it be executed, can only be run after some other task.

Here’s another little “gotcha” on gradle tasks. When they’re triggered. I’ve seen quite a few posts on stackoverflow along the lines of “How can I call a gradle task”. You can’t (Well ok you could but you don’t want to). It is executed as a dependency of another task.

Going back to that little copy task I wanted to execute, I needed it to run roughly somewhere after the clean task and before jar task. I ended up making my copy task dependent of compile. That didn’t work so I tried compileJava and classes and… only to later realize that the dependency was in the wrong direction: My task depends on one that is being executed but that doesn’t trigger my task, it merely states that my task, should it be executed, can only be run after some other task.

So I’m trying out gradle in the hope of being able to simplify and streamline an existing maven build which is quite large and inconsistent. And I just spent some time to figure out a few gotcha about gradle tasks and this post is to help others understand, because I think the gradle docs aren’t clear enough on this point

What I wanted to achieve is, to copy all *.properties files in src/main/java to the resources-output directory so they are included in the jar, because javac won’t pick them up since they’re no java source files. What happened was that, depending on what approach I tried, sometimes the copy worked sometimes it didn’t and I couldn’t understand why.

So I’m trying out gradle in the hope of being able to simplify and streamline an existing maven build which is quite large and inconsistent. And I just spent some time to figure out a few gotcha about gradle tasks and this post is to help others understand, because I think the gradle docs aren’t clear enough on this point

What I wanted to achieve is, to copy all *.properties files in src/main/java to the resources-output directory so they are included in the jar, because javac won’t pick them up since they’re no java source files. What happened was that, depending on what approach I tried, sometimes the copy worked sometimes it didn’t and I couldn’t understand why.