gradle: api vs api project() difference-CodePudding

I am quite new to gradle but have good experience with maven. I am wondering what is the difference between these two below.

api project(':my-prj-1')

api "com.mydomain:grpc-helper:${grpc-helperVersion}"

I can see that when using project, i am giving just the project name not the artifactory details.

So when should or when can i use api project and what is the difference compared with just api. And in this case is there any comparison possible with Maven.

CodePudding user response：

(Sorry for my poor English)

I suppose you have a sub-project named my-prj-1 that can build the sub-artifact com.mydomain:grpc-helper.

By api project(':my-prj-1'), when you build the main project, the sub-project will also get built and its artifact will be used in the main project. (1)

By api "com.mydomain:grpc-helper:${grpc-helperVersion}", the main project will try to find the artifact from the repository only, if the sub-project is not built yet, the build will fail. (2)

From my experience, I would prefer the first approach since it a little bit safer. If the sub-artifact is already built then the sub-project build is skipped (due to incremental build) so there are no performance differences from the second approach.