Support Edit Starters for gradle project

[bkbonner]

I'd like Edit Starters command to support gradle projects. It appears to only support maven projects (searches for pom.xml) files. It says it works by clicking on build.gradle and running Edit Starters, but I don't believe it works.

I think the gradle language server could help in this regard. I posted a question to their repository to ask them about it. It seems like the parsing of gradle files is something that we wouldn't want to just do a search and replace on. It seems like it would be straightforward based upon the dependencies that it pulls down. i.e. we'd need to map runtime -> runtimeOnly, compile -> compileOnly, etc. and handle the toRemove and to Add by appropriately.

How should it decide to handle the maven or gradle project? Should we only look for build.gradle if pom.xml can't be found? We could change the error msg to cannot find pom.xml or build.gradle. If it finds build.gradle, we'll use the language server to remove unwanted dependencies and add needed ones.

Is this something we can implement?

[Eskibear]

It says it works by clicking on build.gradle and running Edit Starters, but I don't believe it works.

The README is wrong. The command is enabled only for pom.xml for the moment, see
https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode-spring-initializr/blob/481d1f9f7cd7d4a3151c045c93de83c0b5e93df0/package.json#L57-L69

To enable Gradle support, we need to 1) parse build.gradle, 2) judge if it's a spring-boot project, 3) apply edits on it. This can be implemented in the language server or this extension itself (VS Code has exposed related APIs). I prefer not to add gradle extension as a dependency, because it's optional for Maven users. And I don't see any advanced features in that extension, AFAIK it now provides tasks and syntax highlighting, and there's no dependency we can leverage.

If there's simple and concise build.gradle parser, I think gradle support would be not hard to implement.

[Susukkekki]

I prefer gradle project to maven project. Please fix this issue asap.

[ayasrah]

I think this is a needed feature, lets try to upvote this issue to get it implemented.

[lagerbjelke]

Any plans on fixing this?

[Eskibear]

Edit Starters: Gradle project is not supported yet, PR is welcome for it.

If there's simple and concise build.gradle parser, I think gradle support would be not hard to implement.

Any help is welcome, PRs, ideas, etc.