Documentation: Consider using Gradle as a build environment for Alpaca

[acoburn]

Alpaca currently uses Maven as a build tool. Maven has the advantage of being mature and well supported. It has the disadvantage of being all XML and (according to some) a pain to work with.

Gradle uses a groovy-based DSL and builds on Maven and Ant. It may be considerably easier to use, and I think it would be a good idea to look into it.

[ruebot]

I'm totally game.

[dannylamb]

No love lost there

[acoburn]

As an experiment, I ran gradle init over the existing project and then gradle build. And yes, it builds and runs the tests.

However, I am pretty sure that we need to do some more work to get the OSGi manifests built properly. Here is a suggestion for an approach: it would be good to first split out the sync component (#350), and meanwhile I'll try to get Gradle running with some of my local code. The two things that I think may be challenges are: 1) bundling OSGi and 2) integration tests. And (1) will be considerably easier than (2). These are both solvable, but will take a little work (which I am happy to do).

[acoburn]

Just as an update, I have Gradle working as a build tool on the Alpaca code base. It does everything that maven currently does (OSGi packaging, checkstyle, etc). I would like to add a few additional plugins before submitting a PR, including adding a license plugin and a sonatype publishing plugin.

[ruebot]

Resolved with https://github.com/Islandora-CLAW/Alpaca/commit/302faaf67d1cb11fe8e812c207c2ca90be80941f