Gradle Plugins DSL and Spring-Boot Plugin

Gradle Plugins DSL is a new gradle feature which provides a very succinct way of adding a plugin to a Gradle based project. A good way to show the utility of this new mechanism is in how it simplifies a sample Spring Boot based gradle build file.

If I were to generate a sample gradle based Spring boot project from the excellent http://start.spring.io site, a snippet of the gradle file which adds in the Spring Boot gradle plugin looks like this:

buildscript {
 ext {
  springBootVersion = '1.4.3.RELEASE'
 }
 repositories {
  mavenCentral()
 }
 dependencies {
  classpath("org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-gradle-plugin:${springBootVersion}")
 }
}

apply plugin: 'org.springframework.boot'

The new Gradle Plugins DSL simplifies this boilerplate drastically. An equivalent declaration using the new Plugins DSL is the following:

plugins {
  id "org.springframework.boot" version "1.4.3.RELEASE"
}

This IMHO reads far better, though it does require some level of mental parsing. The best way to understand this new syntax though may to know that this works in concert with the Gradle plugins portal, a centralized repository of plugins, to resolve the plugin related dependencies. The page for the Spring Boot plugin is here - https://plugins.gradle.org/plugin/org.springframework.boot.