The declarative approach is the feature I'm waiting for, before introducing Gradle to the plugin developers in the Scijava community I tried out the examples, run great,

println

somewhere crashes the build as expected I'd love to early roll this out, but the IDE support is non-existent for "build.gradle.something" right now.. it's just like writing a txt, which isn't great for people unfamiliar with what they are supposed to write would there be a way to have this now, also in a dirty/hacky way?

It's early days. We just got some syntax highlighting in Android Studio as a prototype. The work on content-assist is just starting. We'll keep this channel posted.

You should also be aware that the declarative files are currently very unstable. The contents can (and do) often change in breaking ways. Of course, we will stabilize the contents at some point, but for now they are pretty much read only or for use in spikes/experiments.

Absolutely, but I'll take whatever you have at the moment, I've been waiting for this for a long time, since declarative was a major point against Gradle adoption in the SciJava community :)