If you've ever tried to use WorldWind as a dependency in Gradle-based Java project you'd know it is quite hellish. WorldWind itself is fine, but it has dependencies on Jogl, Gluegen, and GDAL. All of which use jars to wrap native libraries. For example, in older versions of Jogl (such as the version WorldWind has a dependency on) when the main Jogl jar loads it looks at the OS and architecture and trys to find the specific wrapped native jar to suit. So if you are on windows x64 jogl-all.jar will load and then it will look for jogl-all-natives-windows-amd64.jar. The problem is it only looks for jars in the same folder. This is fine for Maven projects, but for Gradle projects dependencies will not end up in the same folder.

So, how can we have WorldWind as a dependency in a Gradle-based project?

One solution for Jogl and Gluegen (not GDAL) is discussed here, he provides a custom loading action for resolving the wrapped natives. So you can grab his GLBootstrap.java here and you use it like this:

JNILibLoaderBase.setLoadingAction(new GLBootstrap());

That still doesn't fully help for using WorldWind in Gradle-based projects, we still have to handle GDAL. What I have done in this repo is re-write the WorldWind build configs in Gradle (because why not) so that WorldWind is depends on some prepackaged "fat" jars for Jogl, Gluegen, and GDAL. The fat jar approach makes the distrubutable much larger (because it has the natives for all platforms bundled), but the bonus is it loads the natives itself without any extra configuration.

TLDR - Grab the jar that "just works"

Then in my build.gradle I have something like this:

repositories {
    mavenCentral()
    maven{url 'https://dl.bintray.com/lukehb/worldwind-bundled'} //for the modified worldwind core
    maven{url 'https://dl.bintray.com/lukehb/gdal-fat'} //for gdal fat jar
    maven{url 'https://clojars.org/repo'} //for jogl and gluegen fat jars
}

dependencies {
    compile 'gov.nasa:ww-core:0.0.1'
}