Possible to build Oxygene Android project with Gradle instead of EBuild?

Elements Oxygene
#1

I have a large Android app project written solely in Oxygene. Would it be reasonably possible to build this in Gradle rather than EBuild? I have seen projects like this one for Rust and this one for Python which allow you to write Android apps in another language and then use a Gradle plugin to hook into the Android Gradle Plugin’s preCompile task and run a compiler other than javac or the Kotlin compiler.

This would allow me to benefit from the substantial work that Google puts into the Android Gradle Plugin (tasks to use aapt2 instead of aapt, build App Bundles, a lot of dependency management improvements for free, use plugins like Google App Services or Crashlytics rather than having to re-write them into EBuild).

It would take a lot of work on my end to write the Gradle plugin for this, but I’m wondering first if it is even possible on the Oxygene side.

#2

Short answer, no.

We already support aapt2. I should probably bump up the prio for looking at all bundles.

#3

We were never able to get aapt2 working. After a few weeks last year of reading up on the documentation and submitting code myself and tinkering with it to see what’s going on, it still would not build. I don’t recall the errors I was getting anymore, but it’s been disabled in my project since then.

Would be nice, but it’s not so much any of these specific cases as the general problem that (1) Google seems to make large changes in the build system fairly often (d8, r8, aapt2, app bundles, java 8 backporting, etc) and it would be really nice to have these “automatically” like apps that are using Android Studio / Gradle, (2) issues with dependency management like the version conflict I’ve run into a few times or that a lot of libraries are moving to use a Bill of Materials for versioning (all of which Gradle manages), and (3) I’m unable to use Gradle plugins, which are an increasingly popular way of distributing libraries.

And again, it’s not so much any of these specific issues as that even if all of these immediately became highest priority items, by the time they were completed there would be a new set of features only available in Gradle.