[JAMES-3260] Explore building Apache James with Gradle

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Open
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Unresolved
• Assignee: Ioan Eugen Stan
• Reporter: Ioan Eugen Stan
• Created: 19/Jun/20 12:11
• Updated: 30/Aug/22 07:33

Description

Creating an issue to track the process of using Gradle for building Apache James.

There have been a few discussions on this topic from multiple parties.
The main benefit is having faster builds which Maven is unable to provide because of it's limitations on how it approaches build life-cycle and caching.

We should take care of:

• all that is related to release and deploy (but this can be taken from other Apache projects already using Gradlle)
• the site building (but this should disappear with the migration to Antora)
• the mailets plugin
• checking Spring build
• adding partial tests on JMAP integration (allowing to run only some smoke tests on some big integration tests suite)
• adding and configuration the checkstyle plugin
• updating the Jenkins build
• documenting the migration for all the users that are building James themselves

Issue Links

• relates to: JAMES-2826 Improve compile time
• relates to: JAMES-3225 Provide automated builds for Apache James - (restore builds.apache.org ?)
• links to: GitHub Pull Request #217

Sub-Tasks

• Acceptance criteria checklist: Open
• Apply Apache RAT - Release Auditing Tool: Open
• Add apache license headers to build.gradle files: In Progress
• Implement checkstyle and code formatting for gradle: Open
• Migrate James docker builds to use gradle: Open
• Apache James release with gradle: Open