It has been a while since I tried out the various products mentioned in the subject line together. Seems like after every long break from Maven I end up having to sit through hours finding out exactly which dependencies to include and which additional repository to include and of course hating myself at the end for spending time on another crud application. But its all good since as the title shows  its – back to basics. Gradle definitely shows more promise and I like where it is going very much. My only complain is with its lack of plugins for commonly used frameworks. Some of the hideous scripts that I have to include to make common plugins work was enough for me to hold off on this baby. I am sure more plugin support will follow. BTW I got my back to basics example working in multi-module mode. One module was for backend services and the other for webui. services jar gets included into the final web ui war file and all is good. Now next step is to create a multi-module project where the backend services is also a war with RESTful services. My thought here is to create the backend as standalone RESTful services and have any type of UI or other backend code be able to invoke it. End goal is to deploy the two wars to a cloud provider – maybe GAE (Google App Engine). Will try an android client too. Will post progress on this later.