What is Gradle?

Gradle is a standard build tool that is used for building and deploying primarily Java applications, but it can be used for any codebase. Check out the Gradle user guide for more information.

What is ml-gradle?

ml-gradle is a Gradle plugin that supports a number of tasks pertaining to deploying an application to MarkLogic and interacting with other features of MarkLogic via a Gradle build file. The bulk of the functionality provided by ml-gradle is actually in ml-app-deployer - ml-gradle is just intended to be a thin wrapper around this library, exposing its functionality via Gradle tasks and properties.

Why use ml-gradle?

ml-gradle is a good fit for you and your team if:

1. You're using MarkLogic 8 or 9
2. You're using Gradle, or you're considering moving away from Ant/Maven/etc to Gradle to manage all of your build processes
3. You'd like to use a build tool that can manage the dependencies and execution of MarkLogic tools such as the Java Client API, mlcp, corb, recordloader, xqsync
4. You'd like to have a single all-purpose tool that allows you to define tasks to do anything you need to on your MarkLogic project, including tasks that have nothing to do with MarkLogic.

If you're currently using Ant or Maven and are wondering about Gradle, there are many comparisons of these tools on the Internet; I recommend making this shift. If you are using Ant, it's easy to invoke Ant tasks from Gradle. And if you can't move away from Maven, you can try this Maven plugin for invoking Gradle.

What are the main features of ml-gradle?

1. Utilizes the new Management REST API in MarkLogic 8 to configure and deploy all aspects of an application.
2. Can watch for new/modified modules and automatically load them for you, thus speeding up the code/build/test cycle
3. Can run Content Pump, Corb, and other Java-based MarkLogic tools without having to copy jars around and worry about a classpath
4. Can treat packages of MarkLogic code as true third-party dependencies, resolving them just like you would a dependency on a jar, as well as automatically loading such code into your modules database
5. Can take advantage of all the features of Gradle

How can I start using ml-gradle?

First, check out the new Getting Started Wiki page.

Next, you may want to browse the rest of the Wiki and FAQ.

Then, have a look around the various example projects to see how different resources can be configured.

Finally, if you run into trouble, you can either submit an issue to this project or try asking a question on stackoverflow with marklogic as a tag.