Native support for consuming Maven boms

[awilk...@pivotal.io]

I'm the main developer of Pivotal's Gradle dependency management plugin. One of its main features is that it allows you to import Maven boms and use their dependency management to control the versions of a Gradle project's dependencies. I was very interested to see this GitHub issue which is proposing adding this functionality to Gradle. That's something that I would be delighted to see happen and, as I said in the issue, I'd like to help if I can. Benjamin Muschko asked me to post to the dev lists on this topic, so here it is.

Our motivation for writing the plugin was to allow a bom to be imported and used as it would in Maven if you'd imported it or used it as your project's parent. As with Maven, it's possible to import multiple boms into the same project. You can also override properties used in a bom to allow some fine-tuning of its dependency management. This is something that Maven only supports when a bom is used as a parent, i.e. it doesn't work when you import a bom which is a quite a severe limitation. The Gradle plugin has no such limitation.

I won't go into any more detail at this point as I'm unfamiliar with the process that you follow for fleshing out new features. I also don't know what areas, if any, of what I've learned from writing the plugin you may find useful. Please let me know what I can do to help and, other commitments permitting, I'll be more than happy to do so.

Thanks,

Andy