I upgraded from Gradle 2.0 to 2.1RC1 this morning. It seems the EAR plugin may be broken:

FAILURE: Build failed with an exception.

• Where:
  Build file 'J:\git\gradledemo\access\WASApps\AwardsAutomationEAR\build.gradle' line: 1

• What went wrong:
  A problem occurred evaluating project ':WASApps:AwardsAutomationEAR'.
  > Failed to apply plugin [id 'ear']
  > Could not create an instance of type org.gradle.plugins.ear.EarPluginConvention_Decorated.

• Try:
  Run with --stacktrace option to get the stack trace. Run with --info or --debug option to get more log output.

This build.gradle worked fine with 2.0

apply plugin: 'ear'
apply plugin: 'eclipse-wtp'

dependencies {
deploy project(
path:':WASApps:AwardsAutomation',
configuration:'archives'
)
}