Gradle for Android

*Please take a moment to review the check-in process at Twitter to ensure a smooth entry into the event: Check-In Process (https://www.meetup.com/sfandroid/pages/Twitter_HQ_-_Meetup_Check-In_Process)

For our September meetup, we are happy to have Hans Dockter (https://twitter.com/hans_d), the founder of Gradle, come and tells us about why this new build system matters to Android developers. We'll also have Jonathan Le (https://twitter.com/jle), Lead Developer of Twitter for Android, give us a glimpse at some of the hurdles of adopting Gradle at Twitter, how they were overcome, and talk a bit about publishing AAR files. Finally, Jake Ouellette offered to share his experience of integrating Gradle (plugin) into Crashlytics.

We will talk about the new Gradle (http://www.gradle.org/) based Build System for the Android SDK (http://www.gradleware.com/resources/tech/android). This new build system has been developed as a Gradle plugin by the Google Android team. It is full of innovation, many of them demonstrating the unique underlying capabilities of Gradle. We will also introduce Gradle as such with a special focus on the new features that have been developed as part of the Android effort. For example more generic, platform independent dependency management and the concept of library variants for different runtimes. We will show how these new features are extremely useful for other platforms like Javascript, Scala, Java and C++.

This talk is interesting for both, people interested in Android and people interested in Gradle who don't have a background in Android.

If you cannot wait until 9/24, you can check out Hans talk about Gradle at SFJUG (https://thenewcircle.com/s/post/1288/gradle_open_source_hans_dockter_video) and at Breaking Open (https://thenewcircle.com/s/post/1284/breaking_open_gradle_enterprise_automation_hans_dockter).

Special thanks goes out to Rooz (https://twitter.com/DjRooz) from Gradleware (http://www.gradleware.com/) for making it possible for Hans to speak at our group.

About Hans Dockter

Hans (http://photos4.meetupstatic.com/photos/event/2/0/a/0/event_245648352.jpeg) is the founder of Gradle and the CEO of Gradleware. Hans has 15 years of experience as a software developer, team leader, architect, trainer, and technical mentor in vast array of industry sectors such as automotive, finance, public transport and business intelligence. Hans is a thought leader in the field of project automation and has successfully been in charge of numerous large-scale continuous delivery implementations. He is also an advocate of Domain Driven Design, having taught classes and delivered presentations on this topic together with Eric Evans. In the earlier days, Hans was also a committer for the JBoss project and founded the JBoss-IDE.

About Jonathan Le

Jonathan is lead developer of Twitter for Android since it initially launched in 2010. He's a Tech Lead on the Android team and was formerly with Motorola. Jonathan also has 10 years as a Mobile developer under his belt.

About Jake Ouellette

Jake Ouellette is a Software Engineer at Twitter who is working on the Crashlytics mobile crash reporting tool. Jake's primary responsibilities include developing build-tool and IDE plugins which integrate the Crashlytics mobile SDK into applications. Prior to joining Twitter, Jake was a scientist at Charles River Analytics, where he was technical lead on several research software projects.