finding the executable, and concatting a string together with variable to pass to the command line with the compile function.  Starting to come together
gradle-mode working nicely for me! Need to add some sort of tests, like ecukes or whatevs, but it's good.  Gradle Mode is a global mode now, so it works in all buffers once you enable it.  The key bindings are rather natural, C-c C-g for normal gradle commands and C-c C-g C-d for daemon run commands.  C-c C-g r allows you to run whatever you fancy in normal mode, 'd' instead you would be able to invoke whatever with the daemon.  See README for other key bindings.
updating the README