Hey guys! So I hope that this isn't an overly basi...

# android

[Mike Palarz]

Hey guys! So I hope that this isn't an overly basic question here... I've seen some news about a Kotlin DSL for Gradle scripts. My question is, what does that mean for us Android devs? What can we do with a Kotlin DSL that we can't already do? I will admit that I'm not overly savvy with Gradle, but this did nonetheless pique my interest 🙂

[Spike Baylor]

Hopefully someone more knowledgeable will chime in, but i believe there isn't much you can do with kotlin dsl that you can't already do with groovy. Its just the ability to use a single language for your code as well as to define your build, including all of the tooling that comes with that.

[dknapp]

#build-tools #gradle

[Mike Palarz]

Hmmm, interesting... So in short, you can define your entire build script in Kotlin? If that's the case, then that's actually pretty cool!

[Spike Baylor]

its still a gradle build script right, so you're not just programmatically doing things like ant or something. It looks and acts very much like the groovy you're already using. But using a kotlin dsl instead of groovy.

[Mike Palarz]

Of course, that makes sense. Still pretty cool! Thanks for all of the insight 😁

[David]

Hey @Mike Palarz - don't you worry ...very few have the groovy foo! This is part owing to the docs being hidden off somewhere on android.developers and limited auto-completion. Kotlin DSLs improve on both of these since they have inline docs and all the auto-complete you would expect from intelliJ

[Mike Palarz]

Oh wow, awesome! I always wondered why autocomplete didn't work for me most of the time with my build scripts.... Looking forward to using this for sure! Thanks for all of the insight @David!