Converting a Vaadin Maven project to Gradle
So you started out with creating a new Vaadin project in Eclipse and it created a Maven project and after a while you have noticed it isn't working out for you and want to switch to Gradle to make your life easier.
The good news is that Gradle provides great tooling for upgrading your project from Maven to Gradle and with the Gradle Vaadin plugin you will be happily running with Gradle in no time.
To demonstrate the approach I have taken the Vaadin Spreadsheet tutorial provided by Vaadin over at https://github.com/vaadin/spreadsheet-tutorial. It is a typical Vaadin application with some addons, widgetset compilation and custom theme.
Setting the project up for conversion
The first thing we need to do is checkout the project from Git. You can do that by issuing the following command:
$ git clone https://github.com/vaadin/spreadsheet-tutorial.git
That will clone the project and you should see the following file structure:
$ tree
.
├── pom.xml
├── README.md
├── Simple Invoice.xlsx
└── src
└── main
├── java
│ └── com
│ └── vaadin
│ └── MyUI.java
├── resources
│ └── com
│ └── vaadin
│ └── MyAppWidgetset.gwt.xml
└── webapp
└── VAADIN
└── themes
└── mytheme
├── addons.scss
├── favicon.ico
├── mytheme.scss
└── styles.scss
12 directories, 9 files
That looks like a very typical Vaadin project!
Converting to a Gradle project
The thing that defines this project as a Maven project is that this project has a pom.xml file. What we would like to do is convert that file to a corresponding build.gradle and settings.gradle file which defines a Gradle project.
Of course we could do that by hand, but that would be tedious and error prone and we as developers like neither of those. So instead, by executing the following command in the root directory of the project Gradle will do that for us!
$ gradle init
After you have executed that you should see some new files in your project:
$ tree
.
├── build.gradle
├── gradle
│ └── wrapper
│ ├── gradle-wrapper.jar
│ └── gradle-wrapper.properties
├── gradlew
├── gradlew.bat
├── pom.xml
├── README.md
├── settings.gradle
├── Simple Invoice.xlsx
└── src
└── main
├── java
│ └── com
│ └── vaadin
│ └── MyUI.java
├── resources
│ └── com
│ └── vaadin
│ └── MyAppWidgetset.gwt.xml
└── webapp
└── VAADIN
└── themes
└── mytheme
├── addons.scss
├── favicon.ico
├── mytheme.scss
└── styles.scss
14 directories, 15 files
When you run init Gradle will recognize that this project is a Maven project, analyze your pom.xml file and create the corresponding Gradle files for you! It will also set you up the the Gradle Wrapper that will allow developers who haven't installed Gradle on their system to run the the build.
Making the project a Vaadin Gradle project
While init will do the grunt work of converting the project to a valid Gradle project and set up the dependencies correctly, we still need to set up the Vaadin specific things like widgetset compilation and theme compilation.
To do that lets have a look at the build.gradle file that was generated
apply plugin: 'java'
apply plugin: 'maven'
group = 'com.vaadin'
version = '1.0-SNAPSHOT'
description = """spreadsheet-tutorial"""
sourceCompatibility = 1.7
targetCompatibility = 1.7
repositories {
maven { url "http://maven.vaadin.com/vaadin-addons" }
maven { url "https://oss.sonatype.org/content/repositories/vaadin-snapshots/" }
maven { url "http://repo.maven.apache.org/maven2" }
}
dependencies {
compile group: 'com.vaadin', name: 'vaadin-server', version:'7.6.4'
compile group: 'com.vaadin', name: 'vaadin-push', version:'7.6.4'
compile group: 'com.vaadin', name: 'vaadin-themes', version:'7.6.4'
compile group: 'com.vaadin.addon', name: 'vaadin-spreadsheet', version:'1.2.0.alpha1'
providedCompile group: 'javax.servlet', name: 'javax.servlet-api', version:'3.0.1'
providedCompile group: 'com.vaadin', name: 'vaadin-client', version:'7.6.4'
}
Lets now go through this piece-by-piece and update the necessary parts
Lets first start with the applied Gradle plugins. Lets convert this
apply plugin: 'java'
apply plugin: 'maven'
into
plugins {
id "fi.jasoft.plugin.vaadin" version "0.11"
}
Whoaw, what happened here?!
This is where the magic happens, instead of just applying the java plugin we now apply the Gradle Vaadin plugin, effectively making this project a Vaadin project. The Vaadin plugin will handle a lot of things for us and simplify our build script.
We also removed the maven plugin. You might want to keep it if you have third-party Maven repositories you need to include. In the particular project there are no custom repositories needed so we can just remove it.
Next, we can totally remove the following repositories definition:
repositories {
maven { url "http://maven.vaadin.com/vaadin-addons" }
maven { url "https://oss.sonatype.org/content/repositories/vaadin-snapshots/" }
maven { url "http://repo.maven.apache.org/maven2" }
}
The Gradle Vaadin Plugin will provide all of these repositories automatically for us so there is no need to duplicate them here. So we can just remove the whole repositories { ... } definition from the build file.
Next up the dependencies section
dependencies {
compile group: 'com.vaadin', name: 'vaadin-server', version:'7.6.4'
compile group: 'com.vaadin', name: 'vaadin-push', version:'7.6.4'
compile group: 'com.vaadin', name: 'vaadin-themes', version:'7.6.4'
compile group: 'com.vaadin.addon', name: 'vaadin-spreadsheet', version:'1.2.0.alpha1'
providedCompile group: 'javax.servlet', name: 'javax.servlet-api', version:'3.0.1'
providedCompile group: 'com.vaadin', name: 'vaadin-client', version:'7.6.4'
}
can be replaced by
dependencies {
compile group: 'com.vaadin.addon', name: 'vaadin-spreadsheet', version:'1.2.0.alpha1'
}
vaadin {
version '7.6.4'
}
Again, the Gradle Vaadin Plugin will automatically include the necessary dependencies for Vaadin so the only dependency we are left with is the addon dependency to Vaadin Spreadsheet.
I also add the vaadin {...} configuration to keep the Vaadin version used by the project the same as the previous Maven build used. The version can be omitted if you want, in that case the latest stable version of Vaadin will be used.
The final version of the build.gradle file should look like this:
plugins {
id "fi.jasoft.plugin.vaadin" version "0.11"
}
group = 'com.vaadin'
version = '1.0-SNAPSHOT'
description = """spreadsheet-tutorial"""
sourceCompatibility = 1.7
targetCompatibility = 1.7
dependencies {
compile group: 'com.vaadin.addon', name: 'vaadin-spreadsheet', version:'1.2.0.alpha1'
}
vaadin {
version '7.6.4'
}
And that is it!
Once you've done this the project can be run by invoking the following, just like you previously used jetty:run with maven.
$ gradle vaadinRun
The whole resulting project can be found at https://github.com/johndevs/spreadsheet-tutorial-gradle which you can clone and directly run if wish.