Hello gear-heads,

The aerogear-cordova-oauth2 project currently has a requirement to be built with gradle, in order to be able to build the aerogear oauth2 dependencies.  This affects users, as once they add the aeorgear cordova plugin to their project, they have to switch to a gradle-based build.

I propose we look at what was done with google-play-services as a means of working around this gradle requirement.  There are two ways to introduce a dependency to google-play-services in your cordova project/plugin:

a) Add a maven dependency: com.google.android.gms:play-services:4.0.30@aar
b) Add a cordova plulgin dependency: com.google.playservices

a) can be achieved only after following the how-to-build-aerogear-android [1] instructions, so an even bigger inconvenience for users.

b) on the other hand is as simple as:

i)  running "cordova plugin add com.google.playservices" in your project folder
or
ii) adding "com.google.playservices" as a dependency to the android section of your plugin's plugin.xml file [2].

This is made possible because the google-play-services binaries are published as a cordova plugin via a project hosted on github [3].

I propose we create a project similar to [3], to hold the aerogear android dependencies.  Call it "aerogear-android-services" for the sake of this argument.  We would then register this project with cordova so the aerogear-cordova-oauth2 plugin can have a dependency on the aerogear-android-services cordova plugin, rather then the maven/gradle dependency we have now.  This would then alleviate the aerogear-cordova-oauth2 from needing to be built with gradle.

Thoughts?

[1] https://aerogear.org/docs/guides/aerogear-android/how-to-build-aerogear-android/
[2] https://github.com/bleathem/cordova-oauth-google-services/blob/master/plugin.xml#L28
[3] https://github.com/MobileChromeApps/google-play-services