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Comment by HNJohnC | Hacker News Reader

Why is nearly everyone who tries to drum up publicity here so clueless as to assume everyone knows what their product/app/library/whatever actually is?

What a terrible waste of publicity.

The very first sentence in any link should at least give a hint what the thing in question is and if it doesn't, it should not appear on Hacker News.

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I don't think Gradle needs to spam HN for publicity. It is the #2 (subjectively ranked) build system for Java and other JVM-based languages, and is arguably on the cusp on overtaking Maven for the #1 spot if it has not done so already. It has a pretty tight relationship with Spring and Grails, two of the top three frameworks for doing Java web development.

If you've done any real Java development within the past five years, then you at least know what Gradle is. If you haven't, then you won't, and that is perfectly okay. Frankly, this maxim is true of half the announcements on HN. If I don't recognize something at all, then usually it's a random Rust or Julia thing... and I've grown to conditioned to simply ignore it and skim onward.

I do agree that any public announcements SHOULD include a blurb for the new people who are hearing about the subject for the very first time. As far as HN irritations go, however, that bothers me a lot less than the tendency of announcement threads to turn "meta". Fewer comments on the subject matter itself... more comments on the announcement’s font selection or color scheme, copy verbiage, logo design, or just completely random digressions to discuss why Rust does it better, etc.

I doubt it, if it wasn't for Android everyone would still be split between Ant and Maven.

I am yet to touch Gradle outside Android projects.

Spring documentation and example apps these days are primarily Gradle-based, with Maven as a secondary option. I don't see Ant or Maven being displaced on very mature legacy applications, but my anecdotal sense is that Gradle already has the lead now in new greenfield development.

Does Grails and Gradle really have a tight relationship? In the past my experience has been that these two work really poorly together. Has this changed?

Both Grails and Gradle ship with the Groovy Language, and are its main two products by number of users - if they disappeared, Groovy's only use of any significance would be short scripts manipulating and testing Java classes. (Though I'm not sure if I'd describe Gradle build scripts as "using" Groovy, more like 50 lines using a tiny subset of Groovy's grammar and functionality.)

And of course Grails is promoted by VMWare and Gradle by GradleWare. There's no info about GradleWare's true owners in the verbiage on their about page. Either they want to be bought by VMWare, or they were started with seed money from them and effectively controlled by them.

Gradle is a build and dependency management tool for Java projects. It's been gaining popularity over alternatives like Ant. In my opinion, it has way to many features coupled into one product, but it's slowly becoming the standard.

I have that sense as well (that it has way too many features). For example, I really question the decision to add C/C++ support.

Personally the C/C++ is very attractive.

Those of us working on Android have apps that combine Java and C/C++, so it could be very helpful. (I'm still sticking to ant and make though.)

I thought that many of the "features" are simply Gradle plugins that they happen to ship with the core product. In that case I'm not sure I'd call that too many features. Seems more like a good core product with a great extension mechanism.

I don't use Gradle on anything at the moment, though I've looked into it a few times as a possible replacement for maven on my team.

Who says this is an attempt to drum up publicity? It's an announcement to the Gradle community, who presumably knows what it is and wouldn't be very interested in an explanation. Someone posted it to HN because they thought people interested in Gradle would care about the announcement, not because HN is a marketing channel. More generally, you are not the target audience of everything posted to the internet, or even of everything of interest to HN. That's OK.

Anyone interested in Gradle already knows about Gradle 2.0's release, or will when they next read their email or twit feeds. This announcement on Hacker News is an attempt to market Gradle. The announcement submitter's username was created specifically to submit the article.

Meaning, for example, the tweet that links to this article? [1] Doesn't look like they have a current mailing list other than notifications from...the forum this article was posted in. If they wanted to market Gradel to HN (rather than simply spread the word that they have a new release to the intersection of the two communities), they'd presumably use, you know, marketing material. After deciding that they're doing X, complaining that they didn't do even the most obvious thing required to succeed at X is a pretty good sign that they weren't trying to do X in the first place. "Your post is the worst attempt to write a novel I've ever seen!"

[1] https://twitter.com/Gradleware/status/48388354498154496

Are you joking ? I have been doing Java development for a decade now and would never have heard about this. It's always interesting hearing about major product releases.

I'd also add that my instinct was to click the Gradle logo, hoping to land at their homepage which should explain what Gradle is. Instead, it brought me to their forums.

I wonder how many other visitors were lost this way (Google Analytics should know, look for people going from this post to your Forums via the logo, and then exiting).

While Gradle is quite popular, I agree with the general sentiment of this comment.

What do you expect when the first sentence on their site is "Gradle is build automation evolved.". How informative.

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