JRuby/Gradle 1.1 'Dresden' released

Since our major 1.0 announcement at this past year’s JRubyConf EU we’ve had a pretty steady stream of improvements and bug fixes in a total of four patch releases (1.0.0 - 1.0.4), so we’re due for a big meaty feature release! The most impactful feature, sponsored in part by Lookout, Inc., is the support for dependency resolution without a 3rd party proxy.

By default, JRuby/Gradle relies on a third party instance of the rubygems-servlets proxy which represents a Rubygem repository in a Maven-compatible format, allowing tools like Gradle or Maven to prepare a dependency graph using Ruby gems. With 1.1, codenamed "Dresden", release we’ve embedded the proxy software directly into the Gradle process. With the rubygems() function, users can use gem dependencies from any repository, whether it’s a public repository like rubygems.org or an internal Ruby gem repository.

Currently this behavior is defaulted to off so users must explicitly enable it, e.g.:

build.gradle

/* add the latest jruby/gradle plugin */
buildscript {
    repositories { jcenter() }
    dependencies {
        /* allow Gradle to resolve anything between 1.1.2 and 1.2.0 (exclusive) */
        classpath "com.github.jruby-gradle:jruby-gradle-plugin:[1.1.2,1.2)"
    }
}
apply plugin: 'com.github.jruby-gradle.base'

/* Disable the default repositories so we can add our own */
jruby {
    defaultRepositories false
}

repositories {
    /* use jcenter() so we can get JRuby itself */
    jcenter()
    /* use our new rubygems() function to add a rubygems repo */
    rubygems('https://rubygems.org')
}

dependncies {
    gems 'rubygems:sinatra:1.4.5'
}

In our beta testing of this feature, users on JDK7 may need to increase their available "PermGen" space for more complex projects via the gradle.properties setting of: org.gradle.jvmargs="-XX:MaxPermSize=512m"

Once this functionality has been deemed stable, it will be enabled by default so please try it out, and as per usual, please report any bugs to the GitHub Issues page.

Other Notable Features

The full list of changes/fixes is rather long, so below is a summary of what we thing are nifty and notable features in 1.1:

#131: Provide a command-line property to change the version of JRuby at runtime (./gradlew -PjrubyVersion=9.0.1.0)
#211: Default to JRuby 9.0.1.0
#200: Reduced .jar file size by not packing cache/*.gem inside the archive.
#208: Ensure gradle.rb scripts use the same classpath, gems and jars as their j JRubyExec counterparts

Bug fixes

And of course some bug fixes, most of which were backported and released as part of JRuby/Gradle 1.0.4.

#195: Ensure released versions of the plugin are laid out in the Maven repository correctly (allows specifying a version range dependency on the plugin itself properly like in the above example)