Add Gradle support

[shvelo]

This adds Gradle support for building all Jars and Make targets.

[shvelo]

Any feedback?

[hex007]

We are planning to drop javaFX support and it is up to @recompileorg to decide if gradle support makes sense

[shvelo]

This is not really specific to JavaFX

[recompileorg]

We did drop JavaFX support as no one wanted it.

[MadRatSRP]

Is there any progress?

[recompileorg]

I don't know that anyone is working on it? There isn't much demand.

[MadRatSRP]

I don't know that anyone is working on it? There isn't much demand.

So nobody did approved those changes? Why?

[recompileorg]

@MadRatSRP Initially, the concern was that we were dropping JavaFX support. No changes to this request were made in response to that. As it is now, it conflicts with the main branch.

This request has been open for 3 years now, and nothing has changed. No one has taken up the cause. No one has offered to fix the issues. No one has or submitted their own pull request. Absent someone the maintain it, that task would fall to me. Gradle is a lot more involved than ant, and my time is very limited as it is.

I may be being a little unfair as I have very little experience with Gradle and all of it has been negative. Before we started this project, we had hoped to revive MicroEmulator, which used an outdated (and unsupported) version of Gradle. My impression is that forward compatibility was going to be a real problem if we continued to use it. I switched that project to ant and couldn't have been happier with the ease of that process.

I honestly don't see what value that Gradle support offers us. We don't have complicated needs and ant seems more than adequate. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think we get anything in exchange for the additional complexity and maintenance overhead.

Why do you want Gradle support?

[shvelo]

I can update this pull request to resolve conflicts and remove JavaFX tasks

[MadRatSRP]

@MadRatSRP Initially, the concern was that we were dropping JavaFX support. No changes to this request were made in response to that. As it is now, it conflicts with the main branch.

This request has been open for 3 years now, and nothing has changed. No one has taken up the cause. No one has offered to fix the issues. No one has or submitted their own pull request. Absent someone the maintain it, that task would fall to me. Gradle is a lot more involved than ant, and my time is very limited as it is.

I may be being a little unfair as I have very little experience with Gradle and all of it has been negative. Before we started this project, we had hoped to revive MicroEmulator, which used an outdated (and unsupported) version of Gradle. My impression is that forward compatibility was going to be a real problem if we continued to use it. I switched that project to ant and couldn't have been happier with the ease of that process.

I honestly don't see what value that Gradle support offers us. We don't have complicated needs and ant seems more than adequate. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think we get anything in exchange for the additional complexity and maintenance overhead.

Why do you want Gradle support?

In July Compose for Android was released and Compose for Multiplatform was released previously. Compose is the new way of making Kotlin GUI apps so if we'll port code to Kotlin and port from Ant to Gradle we can turn FreeJ2ME into a multiplatform emulator

[hex007]

I work full time as an Android developer and I would not recommend switching to gradle.

It is already a multi-platform emulator. You can run it on Windows, Mac-OS, and Linux. Additionally it runs on Raspberry Pi and other SBCs quite well as it is.