Hey, Android Devs I hope that you are recently seeing posts & videos regarding the migration of build.gradlefrom Groovy to Kotlin DSL(KTS). I have decided to learn more about Kotlin DSL(KTS), what are the benefits and harms of Kotlin DSL instead of Groovy? Should we convert the existing project's build scripts from Groovy to KTS? Should we start to use Kotlin DSL for new projects? etc. So, in this article, I will summarize my findings and share my idea with you. Let’s start with the basics
For many years, we’ve been using Groovy to craft build scripts for our Android projects. As any Android developer knows, even for simple build systems, managing dependencies is a must. You’re likely familiar with writing something like the following snippet:
dependencies {
implementation 'androidx.core:core-ktx:1.7.0'
implementation 'androidx.appcompat:appcompat:1.5.1'
implementation 'com.google.android.material:material:1.7.0'
implementation 'androidx.constraintlayout:constraintlayout:2.1.4'
implementation 'androidx.legacy:legacy-support-v4:1.0.0'
implementation 'androidx.recyclerview:recyclerview:1.2.1'
// Test
testImplementation 'junit:junit:4.13.2'
androidTestImplementation 'androidx.test.ext:junit:1.1.5'
androidTestImplementation 'androidx.test.espresso:espresso-core:3.5.1'
testImplementation "com.google.truth:truth:1.1.3"
androidTestImplementation 'androidx.test:runner:1.4.0'
androidTestImplementation 'androidx.test:rules:1.4.0'
}
his is a standard part of the default dependency code block found in every freshly created application-level build.gradle file. It's worth noting that this file contains a portion of the overall build script written in the Groovy scripting language.
Now (actually after Gradle 5.0), Gradle has started to support Kotlin DSL(KTS) in building scripts. The short meaning of this is that you can write and build scripts with the power of Kotlin for your projects.